ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1514669
This article is part of the Research TopicSocial Interaction in Cyberspace: Online Gaming, Social Media, and Mental HealthView all 6 articles
From Perceived Threat to Coping Strategies: Exploring the Role of Social Media and its Impact on Loneliness and Anxiety during the COVID-19 Quarantine
Provisionally accepted- 1Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
- 2Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study explores the crucial role of social media in helping individuals cope with mental health issues during significant crises, particularly through the lens of the OSROR model. It takes an optimistic view of social media as a vital tool in crisis management, emphasizing its ability to provide essential information and social support, thereby enhancing psychological resilience and well-being. By surveying 517 participants, the research investigates how social media influences anxiety, loneliness, perceived threats, and resilience among individuals in social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings reveal that social media significantly alleviates anxiety and loneliness, primarily by enhancing social support and psychological resilience. Notably, the effect of social support on reducing loneliness exceeds that of information seeking on mitigating anxiety. The study also highlights resilience as a key factor in mitigating mental health challenges, showing that it negatively correlates with both loneliness and anxiety.Additionally, incidental exposure to information on social media is found to weaken the link between perceived threat and information seeking. These results provide new insights into the application of the OSROR model in the mental health domain, emphasizing the need for interventions that enhance social support and resilience, and improve the quality of crisis-related information shared on social media.
Keywords: Social Media, Mental Health, perceived threat, resilience, information seeking, social support
Received: 22 Oct 2024; Accepted: 05 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jin, Zhang and Luo. 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: Jing Jin, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.