Abstract

The purposes of the study are to find out adolescents' psychological characteristics such as self-concept, attachment, self-controllability, and impulsivity for the cellular phone addiction. The subjects were 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade of 515 high school in seoul, kyoung-gi region and used cellular phone. According to the cellular phone addiction test, this study defined the cellular phone addiction group(n=136) as upper 25%, the non - addiction group(n=130) as lower 25%. The results of the study are as follows: As a result of t-test, a significant difference was found in psychological characteristics between addiction group and non-addiction group. In case of self-concept, addiction group showed lower score in the rest of four subtypes except interpersonal relationship. Addiction group showed higher mean score in attachment-dependence and attachment-anxiety; however, it showed lower mean score in attachment-close. In addition to, Addiction group presented lower Self-controllability and higher impulsivity than non-addiction group. Finally, the step-wise multiple regression analysis demonstrated that impulsivity most effectively explained the cellular phone addiction. attachment -anxiety and attachment-dependence were significant variables explaining for cellular phone addiction. According to the results, adolescent who used addictively cellular phone are dependent, and anxiety, and have low self-controllability and high impulsivity. to understand the psychological mechanism for reason that they use cellular phone addictively and to develop an effective plan to decrease negative using of cellular phone. Among those results, self-concept and impulsivity is similar to other results of behavior addition studies. Thus, it is necessary to study more about those elements and to intervene adolescent's unstable psychological characteristics.