A new study has revealed that the act of snubbing a person in favour of your mobile phone leads to higher levels of depression and ruins relationships.
The practice is a common point of conflict in personal relationships as mobile phones have essentially become extensions of our brains, permanently attached to our hands.
In the study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour, pnubbing your partner, dubbed ‘phubbing’, was found to lead to conflict (no surprise there) and decreasing reported levels of relationship satisfaction.
“What we discovered was that when someone perceived that their partner phubbed them, this created conflict and led to lower levels of reported relationship satisfaction,” Professor James Roberts explained to The Independent.
“These lower levels of relationship satisfaction, in turn, led to lower levels of life satisfaction and, ultimately, higher levels of depression.”
A total of 145 adults in romantic relationships were surveyed and 23 per cent said phubbing had caused conflict and 37 per cent said they felt depressed some of the time.
“In everyday interactions with significant others, people often assume that momentary distractions by their cell phones are not a big deal,” Professor Meredith David said.
“However, our findings suggest that the more often a couple’s time spent together is interrupted by one individual attending to his/her cellphone, the less likely it is that the other individual is satisfied in the overall relationship.”