Title: Is a Decrease in Social Skills an Increase in Phone Usage?
Presenters: Kennedy G. Ralph
Faculty Supervisor: Dr. Aurora Ramos Nuñez
Abstract: Smartphones took the world by storm in the 2000s. Over the years, smartphones have become almost an extension of ourselves. Each generation responds to technology in a very unique and different way. It is evident that the younger generation is much more involved with smartphones as well as technology as a whole. How is spending too much time on your smartphone related to your well-being? The purpose of the present study is to measure EI, mindfulness, and social competence among different age cohorts and see if there are differences in phone usage. We expect to find that participants who score higher on Emotional Intelligence (EI), Social Skills, and Mindfulness will score lower on Problematic Phone Usage Scale. Young adults will score lower on EI, Social Skills, and Mindfulness and higher on Problematic Phone Usage than older adults and elderly. We ran a two-tailed Pearson correlational analyses among the factors EI, mindfulness, social competence, and problematic phone usage and an ex-post facto between the four cohorts with ages ranging 18-30 (n=105), 31-40 years old (n= 30), 41-50 (n= 30), and 51 and older (n= 21). Survey questions included the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire- Short Form (TEIQ-SF), Five Facet Mindfulness Scale, Social Competence, and Problematic Phone Usage Scale. Data showed that as age increased phone usage decreased. EI, mindfulness, and social competence scores for young adults were much lower than for older and elderly adults while young adults had a significantly larger problematic phone usage than older adults. In this study, we wanted to see how technology negatively impacts the development of social and the ability to regulate emotions. This rational is due to the fact that the younger generation has grown up with technology, whereas the older generation was introduced much later in life.
Keywords: emotional intelligence, phone usage, mindfulness, social competence, technology
