IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0329466.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Correlations between social media addiction and anxiety, depression, FoMO, loneliness and self-esteem among students: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Zhang Jing
  • Wang Yang
  • Zhou Lei
  • Wu Junmei
  • Li Hui
  • Zhu Tianmin

Abstract

Background and aims: With the ubiquity of the internet, social media have become an essential part of daily life. There are various types of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, WeChat and SNS. Social media addiction (SMA) was found to be significantly associated with mental health concerns, self-esteem, fear of missing out (FoMO), and loneliness on the basis of a literature review concerning SMA. To further explore the connections between SMA and anxiety, depression, self-esteem, FoMO and loneliness, we performed a meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize the previous findings, Methods: The PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Biological Medicine (CBM) and Technology Journal Database (VIP) databases were accessed to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis. This search was updated in April. Pooled Pearson’s correlation coefficients between SMA and anxiety, depression, loneliness, FoMO and self-esteem were calculated with STATA software via a random or fixed effects model. Results: Thirty-two studies involving a total of 26166 students were identified. The meta-analysis revealed positive correlations between SMA and anxiety, depression, loneliness and FoMO (anxiety: summary r = 0.31, 95% CI = 0.25–0.36, P

Suggested Citation

  • Zhang Jing & Wang Yang & Zhou Lei & Wu Junmei & Li Hui & Zhu Tianmin, 2025. "Correlations between social media addiction and anxiety, depression, FoMO, loneliness and self-esteem among students: A systematic review and meta-analysis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 20(9), pages 1-18, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0329466
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329466
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0329466
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0329466&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0329466?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0329466. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.