Understanding FOMO, Social Media Addiction, and Subjective Well-being among Young Adults

Description

Page: 218-222

Rubini T. R. and Shilpa Siby (Department of Psychology, Stella Maris College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu)

Technology has evolved a lot; we have reached a point where almost everything has become handy. People invest a lot of their time online. Today we can easily know about other people’s life updates and can connect to people. The population that uses social media a lot is adolescents and young adults. Being bombarded with information and minute details about other’s lives can negatively impact individuals and one among them is the anxiety or fear of missing rewarding experiences that others are having. Technology and social media have pros and cons which has been the area of research in recent times. A correlation analysis was done to understand the relationship between fear of missing out (FOMO), social media addiction and subjective well-being among young adults. This study was conducted on 99 participants from India through circulating questionnaires on Fear of missing out scale by Mazlum and Atalay in 2022; Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale by Andreassen et al. in 2016; and The BBC Well-being scale by Kinderman et al. in 2011. The results revealed that there is a moderate positive correlation between FOMO and social media addiction, and a weak negative correlation between FOMO and subjective well-being. Additionally, there was also a moderate negative correlation between social media addiction and subjective well-being. This study shed light on the relationship between these variables.