ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Anxiety and Stress Disorders
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1592132
Anxiety Mediates the Effect of Social Media Addiction on Negative Attentional Bias: The Moderating Role of Impulsivity
Provisionally accepted
- Air Force Medical University, Xi'an, China
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Objective: In China, platforms such as WeChat serve as integral hubs for communication, education, and daily life, rendering social media addiction a pressing concern among university students. Their profound digital immersion, combined with academic pressures, creates a unique contextual milieu where the cognitive ramifications of addiction, including negative attentional bias may be exacerbated. This study therefore aims to investigate the mediating role of anxiety and the moderating role of impulsivity in the relationship between social media addiction and negative attentional bias.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 1,006 Chinese university students (81.1% male; the mean age of participants was 21.45 ± 2.013 years). Participants completed measures of social media addiction, anxiety, negative attentional bias, and impulsivity. Data were analyzed using SPSS and PROCESS macros for mediation and moderation effects with bootstrapping.Results: Social media addiction directly predicted negative attentional bias (β = 0.270, p < 0.001) and indirectly through anxiety (indirect effect = 0.111, 95% CI [0.073, 0.153]). Impulsivity moderated both the direct effect (β = -0.020, p < 0.001) and the anxiety-mediated pathway (β = -0.026, p < 0.001). Specifically, anxiety strongly predicted negative attentional bias at low impulsivity (β = 0.893, p < 0.001) but not at high impulsivity (β = 0.023, p = 0.730).Conclusion: his study reveals a moderated mediation model where anxiety mediates the effect of social media addiction on negative attentional bias, and impulsivity buffers this relationship. These findings highlight the importance of addressing anxiety and impulsivity in interventions for social media addiction-related cognitive biases.
Keywords: Social media addiction, negative attentional bias, Anxiety, impulsivity, moderated mediation model
Received: 12 Mar 2025; Accepted: 11 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Qiu, Li, Gong, Guo, Cheng, Li and Zhu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Rui Qiu, Air Force Medical University, Xi'an, China
Xia Zhu, Air Force Medical University, Xi'an, China
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