Abstract

The present study explores the underlying mechanism of the relationship between college students’ social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. Adopting college students’ social anxiety scale, regulatory emotional self-efficacy scale, subjective well-being scale and mobile phone addiction scale, this research tested valid samples of 680 Chinese college students. The results indicated that social anxiety exerted a significant and positive impact on mobile phone addiction. Regulatory emotional self-efficacy played a partial mediating role between social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. Subjective well-being also played a partial mediating role between social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. Moreover, both regulatory emotional self-efficacy and subjective well-being were found to play a chain mediating role between social anxiety and mobile phone addiction. The study provides valuable insights into the impact of college students’ social anxiety on mobile phone addiction.