Mental Health and Mobile Banking

Author

Yekta Amirkhalili

Published

June 23, 2025

What’s the Connection?

In this chapter, I look into how mental health might affect whether people choose to adopt mobile banking or not. While doing my review of past studies (refer to study 1 here), I noticed that a lot of research talks about how things like trust, risk, and perceived ease of use affect adoption. But very few studies look at how a person’s mental and emotional state influences their behavior. Especially because some studies actively showed how not accounting for people’s emotions were sometiems giving them strange results.

I also found that even if the literature did talk about emotions, it was mostly about emotions as a result of the adoption/use of a technology. Not about how your general mood or feelings or struggles impact how you behave and interact with technology. Like I know when I’m stressed out or dreading something, the doom scrolling gets worse! But social media apps are built to be addictive and drag you in and make you want it more. Until you actually stop enjoying it and being online is no longer fun. In fact, I read just recently how engagement and use of social media apps has dropped in recent years! I’ll find the citation for it later! Anyway, I digress… Point is, I think your mood definitely affects how you interact with the world and technology is part of that world. So, what about people who have special moods? That is, certain behavioral or mental challenges? Not exactly disabilities, but hidden challenges often ignored!

I wanted to explore whether people who are feeling mentally well are more or less likely to use mobile banking. My guess going in was that people with better mental health might feel more confident and more open to using this tech. But I found out it was actually the opposite! Then I got to thinking… why is that? Well, Here’s my guess:

Maybe people with poorer mental health actually rely on mobile banking to avoid going out and talking to people, or dealing with stress in traditional banking.
Maybe people who are happy don’t bank and don’t stress about money!
It’s not a causation, and I don’t know which comes first - are people who bank less happier or is it that happy people don’t bank as often? This is not the study to answer that. But that would be a cool study!

I used Canadian survey data and looked at three things related to mental health:

How satisfied are you in your relationships (RS)
How dependent are you on your smartphones (SD)
Whether or not you use social media (SNS)

I also tested whether these three things change (or “moderate”) how mental health affects mobile banking adoption. This chapter is where I introduce mental health as a new factor in mobile banking adoption models. I show how mental and emotional states might be just as important as the usual stuff like trust or app features. The results surprised me, and hopefully, they’ll give banks and researchers something new to think about too.

By the way, this chapter was already published in Electronic Commerce Research.

--- title: "Mental Health and Mobile Banking" author: "Yekta Amirkhalili" date: "today" format: html: code-fold: false code-tools: true self-contained: false execute: eval: true echo: true warning: false message: false error: false results: 'asis' #css: style.css ---  <style> .quarto-title h1.title { font-size: 1.5rem; } h2{ font-size: 1.2rem; background-color:rgba(128, 170, 156, 0.48); } .future-idea-box { border: 2px solid var(--quarto-hl-header-color, #86bdab); /* Uses Quarto header color variable or fallback */ border-radius: 8px; padding: 1em; margin: 1em 0; background: #f9f9fc; } .future-idea-title { font-weight: bold; color: var(--quarto-hl-header-color,rgb(111, 172, 152)); margin-bottom: 0.5em; font-size: 1.1em; } </style>  ## What’s the Connection? In this chapter, I look into how mental health might affect whether people choose to adopt mobile banking or not. While doing my review of past studies (refer to study 1 [here](study1_DA.html)), I noticed that a lot of research talks about how things like trust, risk, and perceived ease of use affect adoption. But very few studies look at how a person’s mental and emotional state influences their behavior. Especially because some studies actively showed how not accounting for people's emotions were sometiems giving them strange results. I also found that even if the literature did talk about emotions, it was mostly about emotions as a result of the adoption/use of a technology. Not about how your general mood or feelings or struggles impact how you behave and interact with technology. Like I know when I'm stressed out or dreading something, the doom scrolling gets worse! But social media apps are built to be addictive and drag you in and make you want it more. Until you actually stop enjoying it and being online is no longer fun. In fact, I read just recently how engagement and use of social media apps has dropped in recent years! I'll find the citation for it later! Anyway, I digress... Point is, I think your mood definitely affects how you interact with the world and technology is part of that world. So, what about people who have special moods? That is, certain behavioral or mental challenges? Not exactly disabilities, but hidden challenges often ignored! I wanted to explore whether people who are feeling mentally well are more or less likely to use mobile banking. My guess going in was that people with better mental health might feel more confident and more open to using this tech. But I found out it was actually the opposite! Then I got to thinking... why is that? Well, Here's my guess: * Maybe people with poorer mental health actually rely on mobile banking to avoid going out and talking to people, or dealing with stress in traditional banking. * Maybe people who are happy don't bank and don't stress about money! * It's not a causation, and I don't know which comes first - are people who bank less happier or is it that happy people don't bank as often? This is not the study to answer that. But that would be a cool study! I used Canadian survey data and looked at three things related to mental health: * How satisfied are you in your relationships (RS) * How dependent are you on your smartphones (SD) * Whether or not you use social media (SNS) I also tested whether these three things change (or "moderate") how mental health affects mobile banking adoption. This chapter is where I introduce mental health as a new factor in mobile banking adoption models. I show how mental and emotional states might be just as important as the usual stuff like trust or app features. The results surprised me, and hopefully, they'll give banks and researchers something new to think about too. By the way, this chapter was already published in [Electronic Commerce Research](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10660-024-09905-7).