According to a survey conducted in 2015, there are more than 1.5 billion smartphone users worldwide and, overall, more than 1 billion smartphones are estimated to have been sold (Demirci et al., 2015). Smartphone ownership was 56% in 2013 in the United States (Smith, 2013) and 79% in 2012 in Switzerland (Suter et al., 2015). Based on a survey conducted in South Korea, about 9 out of 10 people own a smartphone and the usage time is steadily increasing (Jeong et al., 2020). More than 2.23 billion people use Facebook monthly, and appear to share their thoughts on social issues and details of friends through this platform (Wiese et al., 2020). In addition, more than 90% of adults in the United States visit social media websites, and in the United Kingdom people spend an average of 136 min a day on social media; such people make social comparisons through their use of social network services (SNS) and their behavior is significantly influenced by these social comparisons (Oh et al., 2014).

The 2018 Digital Information Gap Survey Report published by the National Information Society Agency (NIA) comprehensively measured the level and characteristics of the information gap occurring in the digital environment of South Korea and found that, taking the level of the general public as 100, the level of digital informatization of people with disabilities was 74.6% as of 2018. This was higher than the average (68.9%) of people with disabilities, low-income, farmers, fishermen, and the elderly, which comprised the information-vulnerable groups in the digital information gap survey and was the second highest after the low-income group (86.8%). Even relative to other groups, this information gap for people with disabilities has been increasing every year (National Information Society Agency, 2019).

Quantitative growth and the narrowing of the gap in accessibility are the result of policy measures, such as the information and communication assistive device distribution project and development projects for people with disabilities who have difficulty accessing information due to physical and economic conditions (Baxter et al., 2012; Duplaga, 2017). The use of the Internet can provide opportunities for people with disabilities to enhance their independence, access online services such as e-banking and Internet shopping, and communicate with family and friends through e-mail or video conferencing. Through such ways, it can greatly improve their daily lives (D’Aubin, 2007; Duplaga, 2017). The Internet can be a viable way to promote social participation for people with disabilities (Raghavendra et al., 2013) who can use information and communication assistive devices to overcome their physical limitations and to engage in socio-economic activities to expand their rights and interests (Jin, 2013). Therefore, there is a need for an empirical study on how the use of digital smartphones affects the psychology of individuals, beyond the accessibility gap issue.

In recent years, with the global increase in smartphone use, studies on the relationship between this usage and emotional risk behaviors, such as depression, anxiety, and suicide-related behaviors, have been continually conducted (Lemola et al., 2015; Sueki, 2015; Twenge et al., 2018). Previous research on people with disabilities has confirmed that digital use influences life satisfaction and satisfaction with policies (Lee and Lee, 2018; Hwang, 2019). In a study that investigated the relationship between social media use and well-being in people with physical disabilities, it was reported that the higher the intensity of SNS use and online community use, the lower the level of depression through intervention tools and information support. It was reported that social media use played a positive role in building social support and strong psychological tendencies (Lee and Cho, 2019). In other words, there is a possibility that people with disabilities experience a positive impact on their lives through online activities.

Studies involving Internet use and individuals with visual impairments have generally focused on issues related to barriers to access and use (Williamson et al., 2001; Gerber, 2003). Among these barriers are the difficulties associated with accessibility, cost, and assistive technology; while the perceived benefits of using the Internet include access to new information, ability to use the Internet in the workplace, and improved social participation. However, the relationship between Internet use and the psychosocial well-being of individuals with visual impairments has not yet been investigated. Initially, visually impaired people could not use mobile phones for other purposes than making calls; however, with the advent of the iPhone in 2009 and the improvement of services such as the voice over function, people with visual impairments were able to expand their mobile phone usage beyond just making phone calls. However, studies related to the use of smartphones among people with visual impairment have not been actively conducted. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the impact of smartphone use on the lives of people with visual impairment and its effect on negative emotions in order to obtain basic data to plan future mobile device-related research projects for this population. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the relationship between the degree of use of smartphones and negative emotions in people with visual impairment.

To determine whether the use of smartphones affected negative emotions such as depression, anxiety, and loneliness in people with visual impairment, this study analyzed the data from the 2016 Internet Overdependence Survey of South Korea.

First, it was found that the use of smartphones for leisure, information search, and communication purposes by people with visual impairment significantly influenced their negative emotions. Regarding depression, the non-standardized coefficient of communication was negative (-) indicating that the more that smartphones were used for communication, the lower the negative emotion of depression. Second, the use of smartphones for information search and communication was associated with lower anxiety in people with visual impairment. Third, regarding the effect of the use of smartphones by people with visual impairment on the negative emotion of loneliness, it was found that income, leisure, and online transactions had significant effects. Among these, the coefficients for income and leisure were positive, indicating that the higher the income or the greater the use of smartphones for leisure, the greater was the negative emotion of loneliness. The coefficient of online transactions was negative indicating that the use of smartphones for online transactions was associated with lower loneliness levels.

Just as it cannot be denied that the Internet and the use of smartphones have made our lives more convenient than before, not all aspects of using smartphones have a positive impact (Demirci et al., 2015; Elhai et al., 2016). Studies that show that smartphone use is related to negative emotions such as depression and anxiety have been reported steadily. In particular, research results on the effect of problematic smartphone use have been reported (Rozgonjuk et al., 2018). Social smartphone use is negatively associated with anxiety and depression symptoms severity (Elhai et al., 2017). This indicates that using a smartphone for communication is associated with lower depression and anxiety. The aforementioned findings are consistent with the results of this study, which showed a negative relationship between the use of smartphones for communication and the negative emotions of depression and anxiety. A possible explanation for this negative relationship is that the proportion of people at risk of developing smartphone addiction among people with visual impairments (16.7%; National Information Society Agency, 2019) was lower than that of the total survey group (20.0%; National Information Society Agency, 2019). The use of online chat or instant messaging by people with visual impairment has been reported to have a positive effect on their psychological well-being while information retrieval has been reported to have a negative effect (Smedema and McKenzie, 2010). The social use of smartphones and the low ratio of addiction associated with their usage in people with visual impairment might have an effect on the negative relation between communication and depression and anxiety.

It has been argued that the use of social networks has a negative impact on emotions. An excessive use of Facebook not only caused a phenomenon of “Facebook depression” among teenagers (O’Keeffe and Clarke-Pearson, 2011), but the literature also uncovered a high correlation between the frequent use of Facebook and depression (Pantic et al., 2012; Oh et al., 2014). This is because many people participate in social comparison behaviors through social network sites like Facebook, and their behaviors are significantly influenced by such social comparisons (Zhang and Centola, 2018). SNS have also been shown to negatively affect an individual’s emotional state (Sagioglou and Greitemeyer, 2014). In other words, while communication through direct conversation on Facebook increases bonding social capital and reduces loneliness, the longer one uses Facebook without any interaction, the lesser the social capital and greater the loneliness (Burke et al., 2010). This is because information such as vacation photos of other people on Facebook induces envy in viewers, which in turn negatively affects life satisfaction (Krasnova et al., 2013). By replacing strong connections with weak connections through social media use and reducing direct face-to-face contact with people close to us, we become unhappy by creating emotions such as “alone while together” or “solitude in a crowd.” In the case of people who use the Internet for communication, it was reported that the depression score decreased at the follow-up after 6 months (Bessière et al., 2008). In addition, using the Internet for communication purposes is a predictor of low depression while using the Internet for purposes other than communication has been reported to predict high levels of depression and social anger (Selfhout et al., 2009). The results of this study, which showed that the use of smartphones for leisure and information search was positively related with the negative emotions of depression and loneliness among people with visual impairment, are consistent with these previous studies.

Information search can be motivated by the aim of reducing uncertainty when a problem occurs; it has been reported that provision of information relieves anxiety in situations such as when facing surgery (Sjöling et al., 2003). Moreover, the pursuit of security through information search can be an important issue in online health-related searches (Starcevic and Berle, 2013). Since previous studies are related to health-related information retrieval and hepatic anxiety, it is difficult to directly compare them with the results of this study; in this sense, this study can be said to be different. Therefore, further research on the relationship between the use of smartphones for information retrieval and anxiety is necessary.

Partial least squares regression analysis can capture the influence of factors regardless of the sample size. Moreover, since each independent variable is modeled using least squares, the analysis is free from the problem of multicollinearity. In addition, it has the advantage that the predictive power is superior to the principal component regression analysis because the dependent variable and the independent variable are considered simultaneously when the principal component is extracted. For all its methodological advantages, this study conducted a PLS regression analysis, using panel data with systematic sampling.

Nonetheless, this study has several limitations. First, the sample size was relatively small. Future research should increase the number of participants so that the effects of degree of smartphones use on negative emotions in people with visual impairment can be verified through various methods such as path analysis. Second, the questionnaire to measure emotional mood is too simple to capture all emotional well-being. The information available for this study was limited to what was provided by the panel data. In future studies, it is necessary to obtain more detailed information about relation between the degree of use of smartphones and negative emotions in people with visual impairment. Third, the data analyzed were from 2016. Although this is the most recent data on Internet use and negative emotions from the national information gap survey, as a result of improvements on the usage restrictions since then, the present impact on negative emotions may be less. Therefore, research is needed to assert the current relationship between the use of smartphone’s features and negative emotions.

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: https://eng.nia.or.kr/site/nia_eng/main.do.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

E-YP contributed to project administration, data analysis, and writing.

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.