ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1623568
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Citizenship in the New Era of Social MediaView all 5 articles
Why Do Users Stay? Emotional vs. Functional Attachment in Pan-Entertainment Live Streaming Platforms
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Design, Hunan University, Changsha, China
- 2Faculty of art and communication, Kunming University Of Science And Technology, Kunming, China
- 3Department of Smart Experience Design, Kookmin University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
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This study aims to investigate how emotional and functional attachments influence users' continuance intention on pan-entertainment platforms.With pan-entertainment live-streaming booming, clarifying the psychological forces that keep users loyal is crucial. Prior studies rarely examined how emotional and functional bonds act together. Grounded in the Cognitive-Affective-Behavioral Intention (CABI) framework and attachment theory, this study tests a dual-path model on 306 valid responses, the findings reveal that attraction, perceived enjoyment, interactivity, and entertainment significantly enhance emotional attachment, whereas attraction and interactivity also positively influence functional attachment. Notably, perceived enjoyment and entertainment do not significantly impact functional attachment, suggesting that functional reliance is driven more by instrumental utility than hedonic value. Both emotional and functional attachments are found to be strong predictors of continuance intention. This study advances the CABI framework by incorporating dual-path attachment mechanisms, providing novel insights into user-platform relationships in live streaming contexts. Practically, the findings highlight the importance of real-time interactivity features and personalized content recommendations in fostering emotional engagement and strengthening user retention.
Keywords: Pan-entertainment live streaming platforms, continuance intention, Cognitive-Affective-Behavioral Intention, Attachment theory, PLS-SEM
Received: 06 May 2025; Accepted: 25 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Liang, Wei and Pan. 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:
Shu Zhang, School of Design, Hunan University, Changsha, China
Le Wei, Department of Smart Experience Design, Kookmin University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
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