Mariek Vanden Abeele

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Ghent University

How much we sleep at night is believed to impact next-day affective experiences. Yet, the existing research is encumbered by methodological limitations. To address this issue we harnessed experience sampling data (68,232 observations across 10,905 days) from 1,415 Belgian participants to examine whether normal variations in sleep duration linearly...

How much we sleep at night is believed to impact next-day emotional experiences. Yet, theexisting research is encumbered by methodological limitations. To address this issue we harnessedexperience sampling data (68,232 observations across 10,905 days) from 1,415 Belgianparticipants to examine whether normal variations in sleep duration linearly or...

Objective This article explores the potential implications of domestic artificial intelligence (AI) systems in everyday households for chore distribution, family surveillance, and the (re)valuation of interpersonal communication. Background We differentiate between three types of domestic AI systems based on the social roles they are promised to f...

This study examines how communication modality influences social interaction quality and its contingency on three other situational characteristics: physical location, partner familiarity, and interaction purpose. Data from two experience sampling studies including 385 Spanish emerging adults and 10,203 social interaction reports revealed that comp...

Abstaining from social media has become a popular digital disconnection strategy of individuals to enhance their well-being. To date, it is unclear whether social media abstinences are truly effective in improving well-being, however, as studies produce inconsistent outcomes. This preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis therefore aims to...

Objective Smoking remains a global health challenge, with 1.14 billion active smokers worldwide. Many of these smokers seek cessation support. The rise of mHealth offers novel intervention methods, providing monitoring and tailored feedback. This study aimed to map the opportunities and challenges of integrating digital behaviour change interventio...

Abstaining from social media has become a popular digital disconnection strategy of individuals to enhance their well-being. To date, it is unclear whether social media abstinences are truly effective in improving well-being, however, as studies produce inconsistent outcomes. This preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis therefore aims to...

Given the ability to use the internet and applications that are both immediately accessible and highly rewarding to users, concern exists regarding the development of excessive and dysregulated smartphone use (also known as ‘smartphone addiction’). This chapter reviews the current state of research on dysregulated smartphone use, identifies gaps in...

Technoference” is a term that describes how parent media use (e.g., phone use) can interfere with parent–child relationships and interactions. Research has shown technoference effects on parents and children ranging in age from infancy to adolescence, such as decreased parent responsiveness and adverse child behavioral outcomes. However, potential...

There is extensive debate about the effects of social media use on wellbeing. Central to this debate is that evidence is lacking due to an inability to confirm causal pathways through experimental research. The rise of social media intervention experiments to tackle this issue has represented a positive change for the field. However, these studies...

The concept of digital disconnection, which refers to limiting digital media use for the sake of one’s well-being, has gained prominence in scholarly and public debates. Compared to a burgeoning digital disconnection industry that commodifies individuals’ struggles with constant connectivity, the development of evidence-based disconnection policies...

Existing research indicates that ‘partner phubbing’ is associated with heightened conflict and lower relationship satisfaction. However, previous studies have relied on cross-sectional designs involving subjective self-reports of only one partner. In this study, the main hypothesis entailed that the link between partner phubbing and relationship qu...

Two lab-based experiments (N = 81 and N = 74) examined effects of co-present mobile phone use (frequently conceptualized as 'phub-bing') on how individuals experience social interactions. The first experiment was modeled after the original Expectancy Violation Theory experiment by Burgoon and Le Poire (1993). Results showed that phubbing predicted...

Drawing from a two-year ethnography with sixteen adults in Flanders and Brussels, Belgium, this study disentangles the social, material, and individual obstacles experienced in day-to-day life that hinder and foster digital well-being. Findings show how these obstacles are interrelated, laying bare the tensions that cut across social relations, dig...

How much we sleep at night is believed to impact next-day emotional experiences. Yet, theexisting research is encumbered by methodological limitations. To address this issue we harnessedexperience sampling data (68,232 observations across 10,905 days) from 1,415 Belgianparticipants to examine whether normal variations in sleep duration linearly or...

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites. However, Facebook intrusion or addiction is a growing concern as it involves an excessive attachment to Facebook, which disrupts daily functioning. To date, few studies have examined whether cross-cultural differences in the measurement of Facebook addiction exist. The aim of this study w...

The reciprocal exchanges of messages, likes, and pictures on social media are typical expressions of mobile youth culture. After all, it is well-established that young people’s disclosure practices support their efforts to maintain relationships, gain autonomy, and, by large, consolidate a place in the world. What is often missing, however, is an e...

Smoking remains a critical global health issue, with significant mortality and economic costs. Traditional cessation methods, though effective, face challenges in accessibility and scalability, highlighting the potential of mobile health (mHealth) applications. However, many existing mHealth apps for smoking cessation underperform when compared to...

This mixed-methods study investigates whether online vigilance promotes mental fatigue, and whether this effect is greater when under pressure to be available online. Additionally, it examines whether passively sensed smartphone behavior can serve as a digital proxy for online vigilance. Data were collected from 1,315 adult participants, who receiv...

Digital disconnection has emerged as a concept describing the actions people take to limit their digital connectivity to enhance their well-being. To date, evidence on its effectiveness is mixed, leading to calls for greater consideration of why, how, when, and for whom digital disconnection works. This article responds to these calls, presenting a...

This manuscript presents findings from a preregistered mixed-method study involving 67,762 ecological momentary assessments and behavioral smartphone observations from 1,315 adults. The study investigates (a) momentary associations between mindless scrolling, goal conflict, and guilt over smartphone use, and (b) whether guilt experiences during the...

Digital media addiction limits face-to-face communication, which can have negative effects on the subjective wellbeing of individuals. However, the effect of digital media addiction on subjective wellbeing has not been adequately explored, and it is recommended in the literature that the role of mediating variables related to social life should be...

Instagram has become a primary platform via which life coaches establish a relationship with potential clients and advertise their professional services. In this study, we draw from Bourdieu’s work on taste and capital to unravel how life coaches capitalize on the affordances of Instagram to generate legitimacy and credibility for their profession....

Recent years have seen a widespread integration of technology into the daily lives of families. Psychological science has recently started to focus on the use of smartphones by parents while they are engaged in parenting activities, a behavior known under the terms “phubbing,” “technoference,” “parental screen distraction,” and various other terms....

Digital disconnection has risen as a new and necessary act of care that individuals perform to counter the burdens associated with 24/7 connectivity. Resources to perform such caring tasks, however, are known to be unequally distributed. Leaning on feminist theory and digital disconnection studies, this study explores whether this unequal distribut...

Drawing from a cross-sectional survey ( N = 1000), this study examines (1) the extent to which Belgian adults experience digital well-being (i.e. perceive agency over and functional support from the use of digital media), (2) which digital disconnection strategies they use to limit connectivity, (3) how their use of these strategies relates to thei...

Using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model, this study investigates among Liberian couples whether partner phubbing predicts relationship satisfaction, both directly and indirectly via mobile phone conflict. Moreover, this study examines whether phubbing by men is less likely to lead to conflict than that by women given the differential power re...

Previous research has mostly correlated screen time with adolescents’ social, cognitive, and emotional well-being outcomes, while overlooking adolescents’ subjective experiences of smartphone use. The present research filled this gap by developing and validating the Perceived Digital Well-Being in Adolescence Scale (PDWBA). This semantic differenti...

Mobile youth culture (MYC) is a concept that refers to the distinctive ways in which young people adopt and use mobile phones. However, most studies on MYC are situated in the Global North, where the lived realities of teenagers are different from teenagers in the Global South. Through an investigation of how MYC manifests in Liberia, this article...

This study contributes to ongoing debates on the protection of teens' privacy on social media. While ample research is focused on teens' privacy management, less is known about their attitude toward data protection. Drawing from cross-sectional survey data, this study examines whether predictors of privacy management, namely privacy literacy, priva...

Psychological perspectives have long been integral to research on mobile media and communication. In this piece, we complete a high-level review of psychology-centered work published in Mobile Media and Communication (MMC). Our “flyover review” affirms that MMC represents a key watering hole for exploring – and debating – the novel psychological im...

This article reports the findings of a multi-method study that explored whether frequency and duration of parental smartphone use in the presence of children is associated with parents’ perceptions of quality time and child restlessness, an indicator of difficult child behavior. Additionally, the study explored whether parental perceptions of techn...

Schermen: we zijn er helemaal zot van. En wij niet alleen, want ook de jongste generaties kunnen niet meer zonder. Al negen edities lang zoekt het Apestaartjarenonderzoek uit wat kinderen en jongeren tussen 6 en 18 jaar daar juist mee aanvangen. Welke toestellen gebruiken ze? Hoe gedragen ze zich in de online wereld? Wat kunnen ze al goed en waar h...

The effect of social media use on well-being is among the hottest debates in academia and society at large. Adults and adolescents alike spend around 2-3 hours per day on social media, and they typically use five to seven different platforms in a complementary way, to chat with their friends, to browse others’ posts, and present themselves to their...

Social media overuse is a central concern in discussions over digital well-being. Digital disconnection is often presented as a solution to this problem, but mixed evidence on its effectiveness suggests we lack understanding of why, how and when disconnection works. Drawing from three recurrent social media metaphors - the drug, demon and donut met...

Although the ubiquitous connectivity afforded by mobile media brings benefits to people’s work, social, and leisure lives, these benefits are sometimes overshadowed by the burdens of 24/7 connectivity, which challenge the well-being of individuals and society. Digital well-being is an emerging concept that refers to how people experience these bene...

BACKGROUND Stress is an important causal factor in common mental disorders such as burnout and depression. To aid in the early detection of chronic stress, machine learning models are increasingly trained to learn mathematical mappings from digital footprints to self-reported stress. Earlier work has studied general principles in population-wide st...

The aim of this study was to examine to what extent parasocial relationships with micro-celebrities and mainstream celebrities differ in terms of perceived reciprocity, authenticity, intimacy, and parasocial interaction. A within-person comparison of survey responses collected among 402 college students in China showed that participants perceived t...

Background: Stress is an important predictor of mental health problems such as burnout and depression. Acute stress is considered adaptive, whereas chronic stress is viewed as detrimental to well-being. To aid in the early detection of chronic stress, machine learning models are increasingly trained to learn the quantitative relation from digital...

Problematic mobile phone use can be related to negative mental states. Some studies indicate that behavioural dependency is related to variables associated with the country of origin. The aim of our study was to investigate if country indicators moderated the relationship between phubbing and psychological distress. Our sample consisted of 7,315 in...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced developmental researchers to rethink their traditional research practices. The growing need to study infant development at a distance has shifted our research paradigm to online and digital monitoring of infants and families, using electronic devices, such as smartphones. In this practical guide, we introduce the Ex...

Disconnection presents itself as a modern answer to problems of media addiction and overuse. But, is it really novel? Through a thematic analysis of Dutch and American newspaper articles spanning several decades, this study examines public news discourses on TV and smartphone addiction and their imagined solutions. The analysis reveals Apparatgeist...

Background: The last few decades people have increasingly started to use technological tools for health and activity monitoring, such as tracking apps and wearables. The main assumption is that these tools are effective in reinforcing self-empowerment because they support better-informed lifestyle decision-making. However, experimental research ass...

TikTok’s popularity ignites anxieties about youths’ privacy on the short-video sharing social media platform. This is especially true for 8–12-year-old ‘tweens’. This study draws from in-depth interviews with tweens and their parents to explore perceptions of tweenhood, TikTok and privacy. In our investigation, we move beyond a developmental framew...

Introduction Screen time apps that allow smartphone users to manage their screen time are assumed to combat negative effects of smartphone use. This study explores whether a social media restriction, implemented via screen time apps, has a positive effect on emotional well-being and sustained attention performance. Methods A randomized controlled...

Mobile phone addiction is a robust phenomenon observed throughout the world. The social aspect of mobile phone use is crucial; therefore, phubbing is a part of the mobile phone addiction phenomenon. Phubbing is defined as ignoring an interlocutor by glancing at one's mobile phone during a face‐to‐face conversation. The main aim of this study was to...

Some (methodological) insights regarding intensive multimethod data collection.

While research on the association between screen time and health and wellbeing is flourishing, scholars warn for a lack of conceptual and empirical clarity on what screen time entails. This is problematic, because a lack of understanding about what screen time entails prevents us from understanding when screen time becomes excessive and/or problema...

Procrastination is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon. Although research suggests smartphones might be involved, little is known about the momentary association between different patterns of smartphone use and procrastination. In a preregistered study, 221 students ( M age = 20, 55% female) self-reported procrastination five times a day for 30 da...

Procrastination is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon. Although research suggests smartphones might be involved, little is known about the momentary association between different patterns of smartphone use and procrastination. In a preregistered study, 221 students (Mage = 20, 55% female) self-reported procrastination five times a day for 30 days...

Presentation on Etmaal about soms first results of a paper about phubbing in the family context. Via a dyadic actor-partner interdependence model, we investigated whether open communication about phubbing preserve the parent-adolescent relationship quality, by minimizing interfamilial phubbing behaviour.

Procrastination is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon. Although research suggests smartphones might be involved, little is known about the momentary association between different patterns of smartphone use and procrastination. In a preregistered study, 221 students (Mage = 20, 55% female) self-reported procrastination five times a day for 30 days...

Contemporary children live in datafied societies in which they navigate and use technological innovations that drive on their personal information. Instructing privacy literacy is often presented as a key solution to help children manage their personal data responsibly. While there is agreement on the empowering potential of privacy literacy for ch...

Successful conflict resolution is important in romantic relationships. With the advent of computer-mediated communication (CMC), partners can resolve conflict using CMC. But is CMC as effective as face-to-face communication for conflict resolution? And does the effectiveness depend on attachment style? We asked 100 romantic couples to discuss a con...

Mobile media support our autonomy by connecting us to persons, content and services independently of time and place constraints. At the same time, they challenge our autonomy: We face new struggles, decisions, and pressure in relation to whether, when and where we connect and disconnect. Digital wellbeing is a new concept that refers to the (lack)...

jats:p> The authors explore patterns of smartphone use during the first weeks following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Belgium, focusing on citizens’ use of smartphones to consume news and to communicate and interact with others. Unique smartphone tracking data from 2,778 Flemish adults reveal that at the height of the out...

Background Despite the worldwide growth in mobile health (mHealth) tools and the possible benefits of mHealth for patients and health care providers, scientific research examining factors explaining the adoption level of mHealth tools remains scarce. Objective We performed an experimental vignette study to investigate how four factors related to th...

Mobile media support our autonomy by connecting us to persons, contents and services independently of time and place constraints. At the same time, they challenge our autonomy: We face struggles, decisions and pressure in relation to whether, when and where we connect and disconnect. Digital wellbeing is a new concept that refers to the (lack) of b...

This study examined whether parents are less responsive to their young children (0-5) when they use a phone. We systematically observed 53 parent-child dyads in consultation bureau waiting rooms and playgrounds. Twenty-three parents used their phone at least once during the observation. Across the dyads, we observed parent and child behavior during...

Supervisor phubbing occurs when supervisors use their mobile phone during an interaction with a subordinate. This study explores the effects of supervisor phubbing on employees’ organization-based self-esteem with a specific focus on subordinates’ experience of social exclusion. Drawing on data from a sample of 407 respondents, the study findings s...

BACKGROUND Despite the worldwide growth in mobile health (mHealth) tools and the possible benefits of mHealth for patients and health care providers, scientific research examining factors explaining the adoption level of mHealth tools remains scarce. OBJECTIVE We performed an experimental vignette study to investigate how four factors related to t...

Scholarly work argues that mobile technology facilitates serendipitous news consumption. This article examines how users understand serendipity in mobile news consumption and whether this leads to news diversity. Technology-mediated news encounters are argued to reduce news diversity, yet these theoretical filter bubbles cannot be found empirically...

In public discussions regarding online privacy, young people are oftentimes portrayed as individuals who put themselves and others at risk with their naive and reckless online behavior. Recent scholarly work, however, debunked the myth that teenagers do not value privacy anymore by uncovering how they manage sensitive information in their everyday...

This study examines the occurrence, frequency and duration of co-present phone use, also known as ‘phubbing’ behavior, during a dyadic conversation and its association with perceived conversation intimacy and distraction. Phubbing was measured by covertly observing students having a 10-min dyadic conversation (N = 100 dyads). Afterwards, participan...

Smartphone logging studies suggest that smartphone use is complex, fragmented and patterned behavior. It is crucial that we gain insight into these patterns if we wish to unveil the social implications of smartphone use in everyday life. Using the smartphone log data of 3042 users, this study explores how users' smartphone use sessions are structur...

Recent empirical work suggests that phubbing, a term used to describe the practice of snubbing someone with a phone during a face-to-face social interaction, harms the quality of social relationships. Based on a comprehensive literature review, this chapter presents a framework that integrates three concurrent explanatory mechanisms that explain th...

Fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) refers to feelings of anxiety that arise from the realization that you may be missing out on rewarding experiences that others are having. FOMO can be identified as an intra-personal trait that drives people to stay up to date of what other people are doing, among others on social media platforms. Drawing from the finding...

Gaze direction is a cue that regulates feelings of affiliation in social interactions. Phubbing research suggests that phone-gazing during a copresent interaction hampers the development of affiliation in interactions by signaling that one is not fully attentive. Because the phone represents the “virtual other,” phone-gazing may be more detrimental...

Fitness wearables and apps provide users with quantified information about their exercise behavior. Users often access this information on Online Fitness Communities (OFCs) such as RunKeeper or Strava. These OFCs do not only provide feedback on the user’s performance, but also offer social features. To date, little is known about the extent to whic...

Fitness wearables and apps provide users with quantified information about their exercise behavior. Users often access this information on Online Fitness Communities (OFCs) such as RunKeeper or Strava. These OFCs do not only provide feedback on the user’s performance, but also offer social features. To date, little is known about the extent to whic...

Using Giddens' (1984) structuration theory we examine how social structures in mobile communication technologies shape the everyday life of individuals, thereby reshaping power dynamics that underlie the social organization of society. We argue that the anytime, anyplace connectivity afforded by mobile communication technologies structures society...

There are concerns that contemporary caregivers are so absorbed by their mobile devices that it hampers their responsiveness to their children. Recent ethnographic work suggests that these concerns are warranted. Scholarly work on this issue is scarce, however, and systematic observations of the phenomenon are lacking. This chapter presents an expl...

In 2007 Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe published an article on the positive association between Facebook use and social capital that started a decade of research on the social outcomes of social network site use. Although cited almost 9,000 times, it received critique on the conceptualization and operationalization of Facebook use and social capita...

As electronic or e-gambling services widen both the reach and scope of gambling practice, a new generation of gamblers is playing in previously non-existent ways. From related fields we know that behaviors that shift to the Internet change both in form and intensity (i.e. excessive online video gaming), and induce new norms (i.e. the acceptance of...

This study takes a perceived affordance approach to explain how differences in teenagers’ mobile messaging behavior associate with indicators of friendship maintenance behavior. Based on a survey among 1943 teenagers, a structural equation model was tested in which their appreciation of three main affordances of mobile messaging predicted the compa...

While concerns about online gambling behavior exist, the involved psychological mechanisms and playing patterns across digital media and locations remain unclear. This study provides information from a nationally representative sample of 1841 adult Belgian respondents. Theoretically, the study contributes by introducing the concept of habit strengt...

This study examines whether self-perceived popularity, need for popularity, and peer pressure explain teenagers? use of the mobile phone to make and distribute hurtful pictures and videos of peers and teachers. A large-scale quantitative survey study among 1787 Flemish high school pupils in 2010 revealed that, in the six months prior to the study,...

This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the impact of mobile messaging during an offline conversation on relational outcomes. A first study examined the impact on impression formation. A 3 × 1 experiment revealed that phone users were perceived as significantly less polite and attentive, and that self-initiated messaging behavior...

Although women make up half of the gamer population, only a small portion of them considers themselves as a gamer. This is seen as a logical consequence of a culture and industry that fiercely concentrate on legitimizing a masculine gamer identity. The upcoming presence of women in the digital game landscape, however, is threatening the notion of t...

Mobile and wearable technologies facilitate physiological data collection for health and wellness purposes. Users typically access these data via Online Fitness Community (OFC) platforms (e.g., Fitbit, Strava, RunKeeper). These platforms present users with functionalities centered on self-monitoring, social networking and enjoyment. In order to ful...

Adolescents’ characteristic understanding and use of mobile phones have led observers to speak of a “mobile youth culture.” This article explores whether we can differentiate lifestyles within mobile youth culture. We construct a user typology of Flemish adolescent mobile phone users based on mobile phone gratifications. Eight gratifications were i...

The concept of “mobile youth culture” is frequently used in the field of adolescent mobile phone research to refer to the distinctive ways in which youths around the world embed the mobile phone in their everyday lives. Little attention, however, has been devoted to its theoretical foundations. Drawing from youth culture theory and new (mobile) med...

The relationship between Facebook use and micro-level social capital has received substantial scholarly attention over the past decade. This attention has resulted in a large body of empirical work that gives insight into the nature of Facebook as a social networking site and how it influences the social benefits that people gather from having soci...

Internet heeft ons veel goeds gebracht, maar het bracht ons op zijn minst één nieuw probleem: de (soms oncontroleerbare) behoefte om online te zijn. Wanneer kun je nu spreken van een internetverslaving? Waar ligt de grens tussen gezond en ongezond gebruik? En wat is de invloed van internet op ons gedrag? In Internetverslaving komen wetenschappers,...

Met je telefoon in de weer zijn tijdens de les, het rijden of een intiem dinertje: tegenwoordig bezondigen we er ons allemaal wel eens aan. Hoe komt het dat we onze mobiele telefoon zo moeilijk met rust kunnen laten? Zijn we verslaafd aan de telefoon of is er iets anders aan de hand? Dit hoofdstuk tracht een antwoord te formuleren op deze vragen do...

There is considerable concern about adolescents producing, consuming, and distributing sexual materials via mobile phone communication. The purpose of this study was to examine key aspects of peer influence and the peer context in relation to two such practices: sexting and mobile porn use. The results of a high-school survey study (N = 1,943) reve...

This article reports the results of a mobile phone use validation survey in which we compared self-reported mobile phone use to network provider data, and examined the observed discrepancies between both data sources in a convenience sample of 466 Flemish mobile phone users (18–65 years). The results showed significant discrepancies between self-re...

This article presents the results of a study in Flanders (Belgium) (N = 264) on the relationship between adolescents' peer group status, their gender and their involvement in different types of mobile phone cyberbullying. By means of a (within-classroom) free nominations procedure, likeability and perceived popularity scores were calculated for eac...