SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Addictive Behaviors
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1663670
This article is part of the Research TopicNeuropsychological Mechanisms Underlying Risk, Resilience, and Intervention Response in Youth Substance UseView all articles
Influencing factors of short-form video addiction among Chinese university students: a systematic review
Provisionally accepted
Xiaoling Zhan1*
Weijia Zhu2- 1Wuhan Business University, Wuhan, China
- 2Wuhan University, Wuhan, 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 systematic review explores the influencing factors of short-form video addiction (SVA) among Chinese university students over the past five years. It identified 28 eligible peer-reviewed articles from seven English and Chinese databases. The findings indicate that SVA among university students is prevalent and multifactorial. Influencing factors include eight domains: demographic, psychological, personality traits, behavioral, social, family, motivation for media use, and platform-induced factors. Guided by the I-PACE model, the review organized these domains into the person–affect–cognition–execution framework. Personal factors include demographic and personality traits; social and family factors represent persons' external environmental influences; affective and cognitive components comprise psychological factors and media use motivations; and execution factors include behavioral and platform-induced influences. These components interact with each other and collectively predict SVA throughout university students’ development. Psychological and personality trait factors often serve as mediating or chained mediating variables for other influencing factors. Conflicting findings regarding demographic, personality, and psychological influences may result from sample homogeneity and research design limitations. Research gaps remain in policy factors and longitudinal or intervention-based studies. This review offers theoretical and practical implications for understanding and preventing SVA among university students and suggests future research directions.
Keywords: short-form video addiction, Chinese university students, Influencing factors, Systematic review, Social media addiction
Received: 10 Jul 2025; Accepted: 25 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhan 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: Xiaoling Zhan, Wuhan Business University, Wuhan, 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.