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The authors explore patterns of smartphone use during the first weeks following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Belgium, focusing on citizens’ use of smartphones to consume news and to communicate and interact with others. Unique smartphone tracking data from 2,778 Flemish adults reveal that at the height of the outbreak, people used their smartphone on average 45 minutes (28 percent) more than before the outbreak. The number of smartphone pickups remained fairly stable over this period. This means that on average, users did not turn to their smartphones more frequently but used them longer to access news (54 percent increase), social media apps (72 percent increase), messaging apps (64 percent increase), and the voice call feature (44 percent increase). These smartphone use patterns suggest that smartphones are key instruments that help citizens stay informed, in sync, and in touch with society during times of crisis.

Microtransactions have become an integral part of the digital game industry. This has spurred researchers to explore the effects of this monetization strategy on players’ game enjoyment and intention to continue using the game. Hitherto, these relationships were exclusively investigated using cross-sectional survey designs. However, self-report measures tend to be only mildly correlated with actual media consumption. Moreover, cross-sectional designs do not allow for a detailed investigation into the temporal dimension of these associations. To address these issues, the current study leverages smartphone trace data to explore the longitudinal effect of in-game purchase behavior on continual mobile game use. In total, approximately 100,000 hours of mobile game activity among 6,340 subjects were analyzed. A Cox regression with time-dependent covariates was performed to examine whether performing in-game purchases affects the risk of players removing the game app from their repertoire. Results show that making an in-game purchase decreases this risk initially, prolonging the survival time of the mobile gaming app. However, this effect significantly changes over time. After the first three weeks, a reversal effect is found where previous in-game purchase behavior negatively affects the further survival of the game. Thus, mobile games without previous monetary investment are more prone to long-term continual game use if they survive the first initial weeks. Methodological and theoretical implications are discussed. As such, the current study adds to those studies that use computational methods within a traditional inferential framework to aid theory-driven inquiries.

How much we sleep at night is believed to impact next-day affective experiences. Yet, the existing research is encumbered by methodological limitations. To address this issue we harnessed experience sampling data (68,232 observations across 10,905 days) from 1,415 Belgian participants to examine whether normal variations in sleep duration linearly or nonlinearly influence next-day fatigue, stress, happiness, anxiety, despondence, and calmness. We also tested whether people that sleep less on average benefit more from a standard sleep increase than people that generally sleep more. We tested 10,080 models as part of a multiverse analyses in this non-pre-registered study. Findings indicate even small increases in sleep duration promote (albeit, in a small way) more positive affective experiences, that effects are generally stronger in the period after waking relative to later in the day, and that effect magnitudes differ markedly across affective experiences. We also found some indication that the impact of sleep on fatigue and feelings of despondence soon after waking may be greater for people that sleep less on average, but further research is needed. Little support was gained for sleep effects being nonlinear. In short, our findings advance understanding of whether and to what extent sleep impacts various affective experiences, and reveal important nuances to this relationship.