Mental health in a digitally fragmented world: Exploring negative and positive associations across spatial contexts and gender

The increasing ubiquity of information and communication technologies has integrated digital environments into everyday physical spaces, enabling high-frequency shifts between digital and physical contexts, with potential implications for health. To investigate the emerging pattern of rapid shifts between environments and activities, digital and spatial behavioral patterns were analyzed using concepts from time-geography—particularly fragmentation—and normalized entropy measures from the digital phenotyping literature. This exploratory study used a standardized, pooled dataset, comprising two studies that collected objective smartphone logs of digital activity, GPS-based spatial context data, and daily self-reports of anxiety and mood. Associations were found between increases in fragmentation levels and mental health outcomes, with the direction of these associations often varying by gender and spatial context. Increased fragmentation of digital activities and digital activities within mobility episodes correlated with heightened anxiety in females but lower anxiety in males. This trend was reversed in the home context, where males with high fragmentation of digital activity reported more negative affect, while females did not. These findings point to complex associations between digital activity patterns and mental health, warranting further investigation.