The association between sex-specific typologies of mobile phone addiction, alexithymia and negative emotions among college students: A latent profile analysis

•It’s worthwhile to model variation in mobile phone addiction severity using LPA.•The treatment of alexithymia may offset severity of mobile phone addiction.•The treatment of negative emotion may offset severity of mobile phone addiction.•We should focus on specific types of mobile phone addiction in specific population. This study was to identify sex-specific typologies of college students’ mobile phone addiction, and to examine the association between these typologies, alexithymia and negative emotion using a latent profile analysis (LPA). Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale, Toronto Alexithymia Scale and Mobile Phone Addiction Index were used to collect data from 1,105 college students in China. The LPA results indicated that a three-class solution characterized by mild (44.1%), moderate (46.4%) and severe (9.5%) patterns fitted the data best for male. Moreover, three-classes were identified as mild (41.4%), high productivity loss and uncontrollable craving (28.3%), high feeling anxious and withdrawal (30.3%) in female. Depression and stress were associated with latent class membership of mobile phone addiction in male, while difficulty in identifying feelings, anxiety and stress were highly correlated in female. Future interventions should focus more on specific types of mobile phone addiction in a targeted population rather than the general mobile phone addiction behaviors.