Boredom proneness and fear of missing out mediate relations between depression and anxiety with problematic smartphone use

Abstract

Depression and anxiety severity are found in numerous studies to correlate with increased levels of problematic smartphone use. Yet there are less available data on other psychopathology-related correlates of such use. Two potentially important variables related to depression and anxiety, and recently found related to problematic smartphone use severity, are boredom proneness and the fear of missing out (FOMO). Our aims were to (a) assess boredom proneness and FOMO in relation to problematic smartphone use severity and (b) assess the mediating roles of boredom proneness and FOMO in relationships between depression/anxiety severity with problematic smartphone use severity. We recruited 297 American college students for a web survey, assessing constructs including FOMO, boredom proneness, depression, anxiety, problematic smartphone use, and smartphone use frequency. We tested a structural equation model to assess relations between depression and anxiety severity with boredom proneness and FOMO, and relations between these psychopathology constructs with levels of smartphone use frequency and problematic use. Results demonstrate that FOMO was significantly related to problematic smartphone use severity. FOMO also mediated relations between boredom proneness and problematic smartphone use severity. Furthermore, boredom proneness and FOMO serially mediated relations between both depression and anxiety severity with problematic smartphone use severity. Results are discussed in the context of Compensatory Internet Use Theory and the I-PACE model in understanding factors driving problematic smartphone use.

COVID-19 anxiety symptoms associated with problematic smartphone use severity in Chinese adults

“…This finding is consistent with the I-PACE conceptualization of affective/cognitive responses (including responses to environmental stressors) as mechanisms explaining the psychopathology-excessive internet use relationship (Brand et al, 2019(Brand et al, , 2016. Prior work supports this conceptualization for affective/cognitive responses (e.g., Elhai et al, in pressa;Wegmann et al, 2017;Wolniewicz et al, 2020). However, mediation results were not supported for depression in the hypothesized model, nor for either psychopathology predictor in the revised SEM.…”

“…Therefore, COVID-19 anxiety (an affective response to environmental stressors) should demonstrate a meditational role between negative affectivity (general anxiety/depression) and PSU severity. Prior work has established numerous affective/cognitive response mediators between predisposing depression/anxiety and excessive internet/PSU severity (e.g., Elhai et al, in pressa;Wegmann et al, 2017;Wolniewicz et al, 2020).…”

A biopsychosocial approach to understanding social media addiction

“…Vishwanath () discovered that individuals who frequently utilized Facebook were significantly more likely to be habitual Facebook users. Other work has confirmed a relationship between frequency of any social media use and Facebook addiction (Hong et al, ; Koc & Gulyagci, ) and similar constructs like problematic smartphone use (Wolniewicz, Rozgonjuk, & Elhai, ). Descriptive studies also suggest a relationship between the intensity of use and social media addiction (Cabral, ; Olowu & Seri, ).…”

Social network sites, fear of missing out, and psychosocial correlates

“…This has resulted in FoMO being consistently identified as a factor associated with problematic patterns of SNS engagement (Appel et al, 2019;Dhir et al, 2018;Oberst et al, 2017;Robson, 2018). A number of studies have also demonstrated correlations between FoMO and an array of psychological factors including psychological need satisfaction (Przybylski et al, 2013), depression (Oberst et al, 2017), anxiety (Wolniewicz et al, 2019), and general negative affect (Wolniewicz et al, 2018). FoMO has also been found to mediate the relationships between SNS use and a range of psychological and psychosocial factors including loneliness and depression (Reer et al, 2019), anxiety (Elhai et al, 2020), sensation seeking (Wang et al, 2019), and subjective well-being (Chai et al, 2019).…”