Investigation of emotion regulation, smart phone addiction and anxiety level in individuals who prepared for the university exam

Students who struggle to cope with the anxiety brought by the exam period and have difficulty regulating their emotions feel themselves under pressure and develop various psychopathologies. At the same time, they become more dependent on their smartphones to escape the anxious and stressful conditions they experience through the applications on their smartphones. It is thought that the anxiety levels and addiction levels of students who have difficulty in self-regulating their emotions will have a significant relationship. The relational screening model, one of the quantitative methods, was used in the research. The sample group of the study consists of a total of 223 university preparatory students who graduated from high school the last year and who graduated from high school the previous year. "Sociodemographic Data Form", "Smartphone Addiction Scale", "Emotional Dysregulation Scale" and "Exam Anxiety Scale" were used as data collection tools in the study. Statistical analyzes were made with SPSS 22 program. Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis tests were used for intergroup comparisons of variables. Mann Whitney U test with posthoc Bonferroni correction was used to determine which groups caused the difference. Spearman correlation test was used to determine the relationships. In the study, women were 159 (71.30%) and men were 64 (28%). The mean age of the participants was 17.78 ± 0.93. There was a low level of positive correlation between the Smartphone Addiction Scale scores and the Emotion Regulation Scale scores; It was found that there was a low level of positive correlation between the Smartphone Addiction Scale and the Test Anxiety Scale; A moderate positive correlation was found between Emotion Regulation Scale scores and Exam Anxiety Scale scores.