Looking at mHealth Digital Application Interventions for youths with Addictive Behavior through the Lens of Beck’s Cognitive Model and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Scoping Review

Objective: To explore the scope of the published research studies on mHealth digital application interventions for youths with addictive behaviors, considering both the development and evaluation aspects. The main goal was to identify the concepts and theories underlying such applied technologies, detect any gaps, and provide recommendations. A secondary goal was to identify the components of mHealth digital application interventions that led to cognitive, emotional, and behavioral change among youths with addictive behaviors by drawing on Beck’s cognitive model and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Materials and Methods: A scoping review was done based on York’s five-stage framework outlined by Arksey and O’Malley. Four leading databases were searched, PubMed, Science Direct, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Results: There were 16 mHealth digital application interventions being developed to help youth overcome addiction issues. Most of the existing techniques involve dealing with youth’s stimuli, emotions, addictive behaviors, and physiology or physical reactions. These were the components of cross-sectional Beck’s cognitive model and CBT. In addition, most of the cognitive skill components were focused on managing reflective thoughts such as planning to stop addictive behaviors, intention to stop, encouraging more of creating positive thinking, or benefits of stop doing addictive behavior. No application component focused on identifying any implicit thought influenced of specific memories on addiction outcome expectancies such as the substance or self-intermediate belief, substance or self-core belief contained in Beck’s longitudinal cognitive model. Conclusion: Findings from the present scoping review suggest new routes for working with implicit thoughts. Some opportunities exist here for the development of CBT mHealth applications to raise awareness in youth concerning the implicit substance or self-concept appearing in Beck’s longitudinal cognitive model. Keywords: mHealth applications; CBT; Cognitive model; Beckian; Youth; Addictive behaviour; Substance