Your thoughts matter. Smartphone use and cognitive strategies for emotion regulation.

Sammanfattning: Regulating emotions is a vital part of everyday life. With the development of modern digital technology such as smartphones, research on emotion regulation has now entered a new era. Emerging questions include how and why different strategies for emotion regulation are being applied in the digital world, and what consequences this may have, when easily accessible tools for emotion regulation now are available at all times and places. This thesis presents a systematic review of current literature on cognitive strategies for emotion regulation in relation to smartphone use. A systematic search was done on PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. 13 publications met the inclusion criterias. Identified cognitive strategies with significant correlations to smartphone use were blaming others, catastrophizing, cognitive reappraisal, mindfulness, positive reappraisal, rumination, self-blame, and emotional suppression. Findings indicate that engagement in specific cognitive strategies vary in both adaptivity and in correlation to different smartphone uses, implicating especially the adaptiveness of mindfulness in regard to problematic smartphone use. Limitations and implications for further research are discussed.