ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1594256
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Metaverse and the Human Experience: Exploring Healthcare, Social Connection, and BeyondView all 4 articles
University Students' Metaverse Attachment and Its Predictors: Escaping from Reality
Provisionally accepted
Yan Xu1*
Linmin Chen2*- 1Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou, China
- 2Fuzhou Liming Vacation and Technical College, Fuhzou, China
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The most ambitious vision of metaverse technology is to create virtual spaces that offer possibilities equivalent to those in the real world. However, like any emerging technology, the metaverse has sparked controversies and raised questions. Why do individuals seek to migrate to the metaverse? Virtual reality experiences enable people to immerse themselves in virtual environments for hours, interacting with content within these worlds, thus forming another virtual universe-the metaverse-that provides a sense of place and alternative reality (Bojic, 2022). As an emerging research domain, the metaverse holds great potential in offering an alternative habitat for individuals.While the significance of escapism in the metaverse has been discussed in existing literature, what drives university students to escape into the metaverse and its consequences remain unclear. In this study, we leverage Escape Theory to examine how various psychological challenges drive university students to escape reality through the metaverse and develop an attachment to this virtual place. We collected 585 responses from university students who are users of metaverse applications based on virtual reality. The data were analyzed using the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique.Our findings reveal that autonomy problems, study competence problems, relatedness problems, amount of time spent in the metaverse, and interactivity all contribute to university students engaging with the metaverse as a means of escaping reality, subsequently leading to virtual place attachment. This study contributes to metaverse literature by exploring the real-life challenges that may lead university students to engage in metaverse escapism. These results provide a deeper understanding of individuals' perceptions of the metaverse and how the connections between virtual and real spaces translate into attitudes toward metaverse technologies.
Keywords: Escape theory, Metaverse, Virtual place attachment, ELM, Contextual fluidity
Received: 15 Mar 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xu and Chen. 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:
Yan Xu, Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou, China
Linmin Chen, Fuzhou Liming Vacation and Technical College, Fuhzou, China
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