The COVID-19 related stress and social network addiction among Chinese college students: A moderated mediation model

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE The COVID-19 related stress and social network addiction among Chinese college students: A moderated mediation model Ziao Hu1, Yangli Zhu2, Jun Li ID1*, Jiafu Liu3, Maozheng Fu1 1 School of Finance and Economics, Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology, Haikou, China, 2 Student Affairs Office, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China, 3 Guizhou Education University, Guiyang, China a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Hu Z, Zhu Y, Li J, Liu J, Fu M (2023) The COVID-19 related stress and social network addiction among Chinese college students: A moderated mediation model. PLoS ONE 18(8): e0290577. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0290577 Editor: Alejandro Vega-Muñoz, Universidad Central de Chile, CHILE * Abstract Based on social cognitive theory and gender differences, this study verified a moderated mediation model to explore the relationship between the COVID-19 related stress (CRS) and social network addiction (SNA) and evaluate the mediating role of fear of missing out (FoMO) and the moderating role of gender. A questionnaire survey was conducted, including 702 Chinese university students.This study used PROCESS to test the hypothesis model.The results showed that the CRS significantly and positively affected the SNA of college students and FoMO played a complementary mediating role. Moreover, the analysis of the moderated mediation model showed that gender moderated the relationship between FoMO and SNA; the effect of FoMO was stronger on the SNA of male college students than that of females. The results not only enhanced our understanding of the internal influencing mechanism of the relationship between CRS and SNA but also considered gender differences. In addition, some suggestions were proposed. Received: April 5, 2023 Accepted: August 10, 2023 Published: August 25, 2023 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290577 Copyright: © 2023 Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data files are available from the OSF database (accession number (s) DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/ZR5YK). Introduction Social networking sites (SNSs) are virtual communities for building new interpersonal communication, where users can create personal public profiles, interact with friends, and perform activities based on shared interests [1, 2]. SNSs are attractive entertainment platforms [3] that are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. Particularly for adolescents and students [1, 4– 7], SNSs are the primary means of interaction in their free time [8]. According to reported statistics, Facebook alone, one of the leading SNS today, has more than 2 billion users [9]. Users can present themselves and rebuild their social identities by creating their profiles on SNSs [3]. Meanwhile, because SNSs provide private environments free from parental supervision, adolescents can easily interact with their friends and peers happily anytime and anywhere. These advantages attract youngsters to use social networks frequently [10]. Although using SNSs can bring convenience to individuals and society, it may also have adverse effects, such as the problem of social network addiction (SNA) [4]. Previous studies have reported that SNA can lead to harmful psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, loneliness [4], and low self-esteem [11]. Moreover, it can cause more negative physical PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290577 August 25, 2023 1 / 20 PLOS ONE Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Abbreviations: CRS, COVID-19 related stress; FoMO, fear of missing out; SNA, social network addiction. COVID-19 related stress and social network addiction: A moderated mediation model problems such as eye diseases [12], excessive sitting [1, 13]. SNA severely damages the physical and mental health of adolescents and destroys their well-being in life [14, 15], and in severe cases, it may lead to suicide [16]. The degree of social network addiction is on the rise [17], which has attracted the continuous attention of scholars [2, 4, 14–16, 18–26]. Adolescents are at high risk of social network addiction [17, 25, 27]. Compared with other countries, SNA is the most prominent among Chinese college students [28], which has also attracted considerable attention from the Chinese government and researchers [29–31]. Recent studies have shown that SNA among university students worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic [32]; therefore, the factors that affect SNA among university students during COVID-19 pandemic need to be immediately identified. Previous researchers have generally concluded that factors influencing SNA are multifaceted, such as social attachment [33], lack of self-control [34], emotions [4], technology [33], enjoyment [35], and stress [4, 36]. Moreover, past studies have reported that stress under certain conditions is one of the driving factors of SNA [4, 36]. As COVID-19 has become health, economic, and social emergency [37] and a unique disaster [38], great changes have taken place in every aspect of people’s life [39]. These dramatic changes have added to the stress levels of college students in their studies and lives [39, 40]. Numerous studies have confirmed stress to be a significant predictor of SNA [26, 41–43]. Moreover, previous studies have reported that fear of missing out (FoMO), a negative personal emotion [44] amplifying favorable experiences in social networks [1, 45], is strongly associated with SNA [46, 47] and drives the growth of social network addictive tendencies [48]. Therefore, this study suggested that the COVID-19 related stress (CRS) and FoMO may directly affect SNA of college students. Meanwhile, recent studies have shown a significant positive correlation between stress and FoMO [46, 49], and stress significantly positively predicts FoMO [49]. In addition, FoMO is often considered a mediator in studies on negative social network behaviors [49, 50] and has become a crucial variable for research attention [47]. Therefore, this study inferred that FoMO may mediate between CRS and SNA among university students. Furthermore, general and persistent differences exist between genders in perceptions of the external environment (cognitive), personal factors (psychological and personality), and behavioral factors (ability, functioning, and role) [51]. Previous (...truncated)