Fear of Missing Out as mediator between Attachment Styles and Social Media Addiction

Abstract

Social media addiction is considered as a behavioral addiction which affects our lives directly and indirectly. Researchers focus on the predictors of social media addiction, and from the previous literature, two variables found to predict social media addition are attachment styles and fear of missing out (FoMO) (Liu & Ma, 2019). The present work is designed to figure out the mediating role of FoMO between attachment styles and social media addiction. We hypothesized that FoMO plays a mediating role between attachment styles and social media addiction. Three hundred and ninety-seven participants (197 males and 200 females) with age ranges from 14-35 years (M= 20.40, SD = 4.10) from University of Karachi, Karachi-Pakistan. They completed Fear of missing out (FoMO; Przybylski et al., 2013), Social Media Addiction Scale (Karadağ et al., 2015), and Revised Adult Attachment Scale (Collins, 1996). After the scoring of measures the results were analyzed by using mediation analysis by using Process Macro in SPSS (v-26). FoMO was found to play mediating role in the relationship between attachment styles and social media addiction. Study concluded the importance of balance usage of social media in order to prevent oneself from mental health problems. Implications of the study have been proposed.