ABSTRACT
Objective:To investigate the mobile phone dependence college students'features of detection of different facial expressions and give suggestion to future intervention for mobile phone dependence students.Methods:Totally 548 college students were assessed with the Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale (MPATS).Two groups were screened by cluster analysis and high and low group standard,namely,mobile phone dependence group and control group,40 participants in each.A visual search task was used to examine the efficiency of facial processing.Participants searched displays of schematic faces and were required to determine whether the faces displayed were all the same or whether one was different.Results:When the expressions of the faces were the same,the main effect of number of faces was significant [F(1,468) =11.26,P ＜ 0.01],the detection of four faces was faster than that of eight faces [(1079.1 ± 187.9) msvs.(1139.2 ±202.7) ms].When the expressions of the faces were different,the main effect of expression types was statistically significant [F (1,312) =10.30,P ＜ 0.01],the detection of sad faces was faster than that of happy faces [(941.0 ± 168.5) ms vs.(997.8 ± 152.7) ms,P ＜ 0.01].The types of expressions had significant interaction with groups of participants [F (1,312) =16.55,P ＜ 0.01],mobile phone dependence group detected the sad faces significantly faster than the control group [(975.5 ± 112.4) ms vs.(906.4 ± 126.5) ms,P ＜0.05].Conclusion:The detection of sad faces is faster in those with mobile phone dependence than in controls.The detection of the sad and happy faces are serial search in both groups.