# Phubber's Emotional Activations: The Association between PANAS and Phubbing Behavior
## 5 Discussion  
In our society, the hyper connection and increased prevalence of ubiquitous technologies have changed our lives and the way we relate to each other. Social media represents nowadays the virtual space where people can interact with others, thus maintaining and increasing social connections and belongingness. This important change in our relationality involved not only young people [63; 64], as online communications appear as pervasive within many social environments: from work to family. Although new technologies may facilitate information retrieval and communication between people, they can pose a threat to the quality of our relationships [35; 36; 65]. A paradigmatic example of such a \"double-edged sword\" is represented by phubbing; from one side, a hurting behavior for the phubbees during a social interaction [1; 50; 66], but at the same time, an adaptive mechanism for the maintenance of one's identity and the expansion of one's social network [67]. Our study contributed to filling the current literature gap regarding phubber emotional activation, accounting for sex and age effects, considering it as a possible evolutionarily stable coping strategy for self-related motifs (e.g., anxiety reduction, feeling of control), as well as for socially related motifs (i.e., social capital and relationship maintenance) [35; 40]. The first hypothesis (i.e., females will have higher scores on the phubbing scale) was partially confirmed. Although females tended to have higher scores than males in phone obsession, no difference between sexes was captured for the communication disturbance dimension. Although females and males showed the same levels of phubbing from a behavioral point of view, our work highlighted how females may experience a higher need for their mobile phone to be at reach [1; 12; 27; 45]. A sex difference in social media addiction scores was also observed. In line with the literature [26; 28; 30; 46] and second hypothesis (H2) predictions, females reported higher social media addiction levels. By combining the results coming from H1 and H2, females appeared in general to be more vulnerable to developing a dysfunctional use of ICT [1; 12; 26; 27; 30; 46]. This dysfunctional use of information and communication technologies, whether intended as phubbing or social media addiction, seems to be closely linked to participants' age [13; 25; 28; 30; 50; 51]. Both H3 (i.e., phubbing is negatively correlated with age) and H4 (i.e., social media addiction is negatively correlated with age) appeared to be confirmed. Nonetheless, our analyses showed that phubbing, and specifically communication disturbance, entertained  
Figure 1: PANAS_NA (negative affect) means comparison between individuals with CD, PO, and SMA scores above or below the observed mean. a smaller relationship with age than social media addiction. In line with the previous literature [13; 26; 52], we found a statistically significant relationship between social media addiction and phubbing, after controlling for age and sex (H5). In our study, the magnitude of the relationship appeared comparable to those obtained in other works where neither sex nor age were accounted for as confounding variables [13; 26]. We did not find differences between males and females regarding emotional activations, in continuity with what was observed in the U.S. normative sample [47]. Differently, emotional activations correlated with social media addiction [30; 31; 32; 33], but only with negative ones, thus confirming H6a (i.e., social media addiction positively correlates with NA after controlling for age and sex), but not H6b (i.e., social media addiction negatively correlates with PA after controlling for age and sex). The same type of relationship was detected for both of the phubbing dimensions. Communication disturbance and phone obsession seemed to be positively correlated with negative activations, but not with positive ones. Consequently, only H7a was supported by our results.