Smartphone Addiction in Adolescents: Developing a Psychotherapy Protocol Based on Cognitive-Behavioral Approach and Its Effectiveness on Emotion Regulation and Loneliness

Increased use of smartphones is an emerging crisis. So, the present study focused on the developing a psychotherapy protocol based on cognitive-behavioral approach and its effectiveness on treatment of smartphone addiction loneliness and emotional regulation.

The first section of the present study is allocated to designing a therapeutic protocol based on cognitive-behavioral approach. Then, according to a quasi-experimental research design, 30 girl adolescents who were diagnosed with smartphone addiction were selected by a convenience sampling method and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. Experimental group received 8 sessions of psychotherapy. Smartphone Addiction Scale-Short Form (SAS-SV(, Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ( and UCLA Revised Loneliness Scale were applied as research tools. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) were used to analyze the data.

The findings showed that cognitive-behavioral therapy in addition to the treatment of smartphone addiction has led to a significant decrease in loneliness and improved emotional regulation skills.

The therapeutic intervention based on cognitive-behavioral approach can be considered as an effective treatment strategy in treatment of smartphone addiction and also is able to reduce loneliness and increase emotion regulation.