The Influence of Social Anxiety on Phubbing Behavior among Young Adults: The Moderating Role of Attachment Styles

Abstract

Phubbing, the act of prioritizing mobile device use over in-person interactions, has emerged as a disruptive force in social relationships. The current study aims to investigate the relationship between phubbing and social anxiety and whether attachment styles moderates this relationship among young adults. The study included a sample size of 102 young adults. The following standardized questionnaires were used to measure the study variables: The Phubbing Scale (PS; Karadağ et al., 2015) was used to measure phubbing behavior, Social interaction Anxiety scale (SIAS; Mattick & Clarke, 1998) was used to measure Social Anxiety and the revised Adult Attachment scale (AAS; Collins, 1996) to assess the attachment styles. The sample for the study was selected through a convenient and snowball sampling method. Descriptive statistics was computed to summarise the data and inferential statistics such as Pearson product moment correlation was used to find the relationship and hierarchical regression analysis was used to assess the moderating effect of attachment styles. The results indicate that there was a significant positive relationship between social anxiety and phubbing. Both Avoidant and Anxious attachment styles are significantly related to social anxiety and phubbing among young adults. Furthermore, Anxious Attachment significantly moderate the relationship between social anxiety and phubbing among young adults. However Avoidant attachment style did not significantly moderate this relationship. These findings highlight the importance of addressing social anxiety and attachment-related factors in interventions aimed at reducing phubbing and improving the quality of interpersonal relationships among young adults.