The mediator role of fear of missing out among university students in relationship between existential anxiety and social media addiction

Social media usage has participated in daily lives with the development of technology has been getting problematic, especially among young adults. Since the emergence of social media addiction as a pathological fact, this study was designed on the idea of existential anxiety might be motivating social media addiction. In addition, the reason for adding FoMO to this study is that over the last years, the science world has drawn attention to the phenomenon called fear of missing out and studies have shown that FoMO increases social media use. From this point of view, this study aims at the mediator role of FoMO in the relationship between existential anxiety and social media addiction. 395 students who studied at Istanbul Arel University and Doğuş University in the 2022-2023 Fall Semester participated and completed Existential Anxiety Scale, Social Media Addiction Scale, and FoMO scale. Correlation analyses were conducted to understand the relations between variables and results showed that they are all positively related to each other. Then, the Bootstrapping method was used to find out the mediator role of FoMO and the results showed that FoMO has a partial mediator effect on the relationship between existential anxiety and social media addiction. Findings obtained from this research were discussed in the light of the relevant literature and it is thought that the results of this study are very important for either science or clinical practice by taking into consideration the fact that there hasn't been a study like this in the literature.