How does adolescents and college students' personal relative deprivation affect mobile phone dependence? The mediating roles of stress and fear of missing out

Problematic mobile phone use is a common phenomenon for adolescents and college students, which seriously harms students` physical and mental health. Why were students caught in problematic mobile phone use? Some subtle psychology process which involves personal relative deprivation, stress, and fear of missing out, may be crucial. To reveal the psychological process, this study used a cross-sectional survey design to explore the associations among variables mentioned above and problematic mobile phone use of adolescents and college students in China. We recruited 863 participants (Mage = 18.70, SD = 2.15) which contain 330 middle school students (Mage = 16.33, SD = 1.36) and 533 college students (Mage = 20.06, SD = 1.06) in the study. The results shown that: (1) personal relative deprivation can predict problematic mobile phone use; (2) stress and fear of missing out serve as parallel mediating roles between personal relative deprivation and problematic mobile phone use. These findings demonstrate the psychological process through which personal relative deprivation contributes to problematic mobile phone use, suggesting that managing stress and alleviating fear of missing out may be beneficial countermeasures to prevent and/or intervene in problematic mobile phone use of adolescents and college students.