How many times a day do you check your smartphone?

According to a recent survey, the typical American checks once every six-and-a-half minutes, or approximately 150 times every day. Other research has found that number to be as high as 300 times a day.

For young people, the attachment is particularly acute: 53 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 30 reported they would sooner give up their sense of taste than their smartphones.

A staggering commitment

This number joins a host of other findings that speak to an intense attachment: surveys have found that 79 percent of us reach for our phones within 15 minutes of waking, 68 percent sleep with them, 67 percent check our smartphones even when they’re not ringing or vibrating and 46 percent state that they “can’t live without their smartphones.”

Yet there are still some who are less likely to become enraptured by the smartphone’s many trappings, who rarely use them or eschew them altogether. They’re at the other end of the spectrum from those who have lost control over their use, who exhibit some of the classic signs of addiction – salience, euphoria, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, conflict and relapse – that I identified when researching my book on smartphone use, “Too Much of a Good Thing.”

To figure out what might make someone susceptible to smartphone addiction, I recently conducted a survey with my colleagues Chris Pullig and Chris Manolis to find out if people with certain personality traits were more or less likely to become addicted to their smartphones. Using a sample of 346 average American college students, we investigated which of seven personality traits might predict this disorder. We also measured how impulsive each student was.

Source: Muslimvillage