Phubbing

Are you a phubber? Kyle Jaeger:

So you are finally seated at the table, ordered your food, and suddenly your phone buzzes. You got an email or someone mentioned you on Twitter, and you scroll through your phone, blissfully unaware of the world around you, including the person sitting across the table. You’ve just phubbed someone.

Phubbing, or phone snubbing, is a distinctly modern dilemma. It happens often, but for partners who phub, it can be a bigger problem than you might expect. Researchers at Baylor University looked at the phenomenon of phubbing and found that it can cause conflict in relationships and even lead to feelings of depression….

The study found that nearly half of the respondants—46.3 percent—have been phubbed by their partners. And 22.6 percent said that phubbing caused problems in their relationship. How serious those problems were varied, of course, but researchers determined that the more often a person phubbed, ignoring the person across the table, so to speak, the less satisfied they felt with the relationship.

“The dangers of phubbing are that they undermine our relationships,” Roberts, the lead author of the study, told ATTN:. “It hurts when people phub us by giving preference to their phone when we’re standing right next to them, even possibly in conversation with them.”

“Our study showed that when we are phubbed by our romantic partner it creates conflict that leads to lower reported levels of relationship satisfaction. These lower levels of relationship satisfaction, in turn, lead to lower levels of over-all life satisfaction. When we are unlucky in love, it colors all of our assessments. Then, when we are unhappy with our lives over-all, we become depressed,” he added.