Should you be jealous of your partner’s phone?
Partner phone snubbing (or Pphubbing) can cause strain in a relationship and can eventually cause depression in the snubbed partner. Pphubing is described as being distracted by your cellphone while with your relationship partner.
James A. Roberts, Ph.D., The Ben H. Williams Professor of Marketing, and Meredith David, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing, published their study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
They conducted two separate surveys, accounting for a total of 453 adults in the US, to learn the relational effects of “Pphubbing.”
They discovered that 46.3% of respondents were phubbed by their partners, 22.6% say that pphubing causes conflict between partners, and 33.6% felt depressed after some time.
Roberts explained that those less secure in their relationship were more bothered (reported higher levels of cellphone conflict) than those with more secure in their relationship. In addition, lower levels of relationship satisfaction – stemming, in part, from being Pphubbed – led to decreased life satisfaction that, in turn, led to higher levels of depression.
The first survey of 308 adults helped Roberts and David develop a “Partner Phubbing Scale,” a nine-item scale of common smartphone behaviors that respondents identified as snubbing behaviors.
The resulting scale includes statements such as:
- My partner places his or her cellphone where they can see it when we are together.
- My partner keeps his or her cellphone in their hand when he or she is with me.
- My partner glances at his/her cellphone when talking to me.
- If there is a lull in our conversation, my partner will check his or her cellphone.
The development of the scale is significant, the study states, because it demonstrates that “Pphubbing is conceptually and empirically different from attitude toward cellphones, partner’s cellphone involvement, cellphone conflict, and cellphone addiction.”
The second survey of 145 adults measured Pphubbing among romantic couples. This was done, in part, by asking those surveyed to respond to the nine-item scale developed in the first survey.
Other areas of measurement in the second survey included cellphone conflict, relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, depression and interpersonal attachment style (e.g., “anxious attachment” describes people who are less secure in their relationship).
“In everyday interactions with significant others, people often assume that momentary distractions by their cell phones are not a big deal,” David said. “However, our findings suggest that the more often a couple’s time spent together is interrupted by one individual attending to his/her cellphone, the less likely it is that the other individual is satisfied in the overall relationship.
