Understanding the smartphone generation: is problematic smartphone use associated with low body esteem among adolescent girls and boys? Gianluca Lo Coco 1 & Laura Salerno 1 & Cecilia Giordano 1 & Maria Di Blasi 1 & Rachel F. Rodgers 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Contemporary adolescents increasingly engage with social media via their smartphones, and problematic smartphone use has been identified as a growing concern. The aim of the current study was to examine the association between problematic smartphone use and body esteem among adolescent boys and girls. A sample of 647 adolescents (mean age: 14.15 years; 56.7% females) completed measures of problematic smartphone use, emotional regulation, and body esteem. Findings from hierarchical regression models revealed that problematic smartphone use was weakly associated with body esteem among both adolescent girls and boys. Furthermore, difficulties with emotional regulation were moderately associated with problematic smartphone use and, among girls, moderated the relationship between problematic smartphone use and the evaluation attributed to others about one’s own body, such that problematic smartphone use was more tightly associated with appearance attributions among girls with greater emotion regulation difficulties. This study provides initial support for the relationships between problematic smartphone use and emotional regulation difficulties on the one hand, and body esteem on the other, among both adolescent boys and girls. Keywords Problematic smartphone use . Body esteem . Body image . Emotion regulation . Adolescents Introduction In Western countries the large majority of the population owns a smartphone with permanent Internet access, and nearly all adolescents go online daily for browsing, communicating with peers, and gaming (Panova and Carbonell 2018; Statista 2020). The large amount of available applications fosters the intensive use of smartphones among adolescents, which in turn promotes the need to always be online and constantly interact with others (Fisher-Grote et al. 2019). Thus, experiencing pressure to not miss out and stay up to date has become normative for teenagers (Franchina et al. 2018). Girls are reported to spend more time on their phones per day than boys, particularly for time-consuming activities such as texting and using social media sites (Roberts et al. 2014; Servidio 2019), revealing that smartphone related attitudes and behaviors are gendered. It has been shown that daily smartphone use including engaging with social media, playing video games, online shopping, viewing TV shows via the Internet, and chatting and messaging, can increase feelings of dependency among smartphone users (Lopez-Fernandez et al. 2017). Research on the addictive potential of smartphones is ever increasing, but most of the extant literature is characterized by the lack of a theoretical rationale and mostly based on clinical concepts borrowed from the area of substance dependence (Billieux et al. 2015). However, there is still inconsistent support for the usefulness of considering smartphone use through an ad- dictions lens and, thus, scholars have moved towards a prob- lematic smartphone use (PSU) framework (Panova and Carbonell 2018). PSU (Elhai et al. 2017) refers to an excessive engagement with one’s smartphone, which is associated with adverse daily-life outcomes and symptoms, such as withdraw- al, loss of control and tolerance, only in part resembling those of substance use disorders (Billieux et al. 2015; Kuss et al. 2018). Billieux et al. (2015) proposed a three-pathway model * Gianluca Lo Coco gianluca.lococo@unipa.it 1 Department of Psychology, Educational Science and Human Movement, University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Edificio 15, 90128 Palermo, Italy 2 Northeastern University, Northeastern University International Village Suite 404, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA Current Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00847-5