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Review
. 2022 Feb 10:13:754542.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.754542. eCollection 2022.

The Relationship Between Alexithymia and Mobile Phone Addiction Among Mainland Chinese Students: A Meta-Analysis

Haitao Huang  1 , Xiao Wan  1 , Guangli Lu  2 , Yueming Ding  1 , Chaoran Chen  1
Affiliations
Review

The Relationship Between Alexithymia and Mobile Phone Addiction Among Mainland Chinese Students: A Meta-Analysis

Haitao Huang et al. Front Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Alexithymia and mobile phone addiction are common phenomena in daily life. Many studies have explored the internal relationship between them based on different theoretical perspectives, but the extent of the exact correlation is still controversial. To address this controversy and clarify the reasons for the divergence, a meta-analysis of 26 articles comprising 23,387 Chinese students was conducted. The results show that alexithymia was highly positively correlated with mobile phone addiction (r = 0.41, 95% CI = [0.37, 0.45]). Furthermore, the relationship was moderated by mobile phone addiction measurement tool and year of publication, with studies using the Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale (MPATS) having higher correlation coefficients than those using the Mobile Phone Addiction Index (MPAI) or other measurement tools. Studies published in 2020-2021 yielded higher correlations than those published in 2014-2016 and 2017-2019. However, the relationship was not moderated by gender, region, or measures of alexithymia. Therefore, our meta-analysis of available published data indicated that alexithymia and mobile phone addiction in Chinese students are not only highly positively correlated but also affected by mobile phone addiction measurement tools and publication year. Longitudinal studies or experimental studies should be strengthened in the future to further establish the direction(s) of causality for the relation between alexithymia and mobile phone addiction.

Keywords: alexithymia; mainland Chinese students; meta- analysis; mobile phone addiction; review.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow chart of the study selection process.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Forest plots for the correlation between alexithymia and mobile phone addiction.
Figure 3
Figure 3
MPA and alexithymia: an analysis of the moderating effects of the MPA measurement tool.
Figure 4
Figure 4
MPA and alexithymia: an analysis of the moderating effects of publication year.
Figure 5
Figure 5
MPA and alexithymia: an analysis of the moderating effects of the alexithymia measurement tool.
Figure 6
Figure 6
MPA and alexithymia: an analysis of the moderating effects of age group.
Figure 7
Figure 7
MPA and alexithymia: an analysis of the moderating effects ofregion.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Funnel plot of the 26 studies included in the meta-analysis.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Egger's test of the 26 studies included in the meta-analysis.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Sensitivity analyses of the 26 studies included in the meta-analysis.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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