Negative life events, emotion regulation difficulties, and problematic mobile phone use in adolescents: a sex-stratified cross-lagged panel network study

Problematic mobile phone use (PMPU) among adolescents has emerged as an important public mental health concern. However, the longitudinal associations among PMPU, negative life events, and emotion regulation difficulties, as well as potential differences in these association patterns across sexes, remain insufficiently understood. In this longitudinal study, 3,816 Chinese adolescents were followed across two waves. Contemporaneous network analysis and cross-lagged panel network (CLPN) analysis were used to examine the contemporaneous association structures and cross-lagged associations among negative life events, emotion regulation difficulties, and PMPU-related dimensions separately in male and female groups. Learning stress was prominent among negative life event nodes in the contemporaneous networks of both sexes. In the separately fitted CLPNs, retained cross-domain paths involved adaptation-related stress in males, interpersonal pressure in females, and productivity loss in both groups; productivity loss was linked to later impulse-control difficulties in males and limited access to emotion regulation strategies in females. Direct comparisons detected no significant sex differences in contemporaneous network structure or global strength at either wave. A supplementary unpenalized multigroup model indicated an omnibus difference in cross-lagged coefficients ( χ 2 (240) = 304.20, p = 0.003), but no individual between-sex path difference survived Bonferroni correction. Over five months, PMPU-related productivity loss and selected negative life event dimensions showed conditional associations with later emotion regulation difficulties. The findings support examining functional impairment and stress exposure together in subsequent longitudinal research on adolescent emotion regulation.