Flourishing in university students: cross-sectional associations with personal and social FoMO, loneliness, and belonging

Abstract

Fear of missing out (FoMO), loneliness, and belonging concern different aspects of students’ relational experience, but their shared and unique cross-sectional associations with flourishing remain unclear. This study examined these associations in university students in Türkiye while distinguishing Personal from Social FoMO and acceptance/inclusion from rejection/exclusion. An online cross-sectional survey was completed by 499 students aged 18–30 years (M = 22.13, SD = 3.23; 76.4% female). Factor structure and internal consistency were examined before Pearson correlations, hierarchical regression with HC3 robust standard errors, relative-importance analysis, and sensitivity analyses were conducted. At the zero-order level, both FoMO facets and loneliness were negatively associated with flourishing, whereas acceptance/inclusion and reverse-scored rejection/exclusion were positively associated with flourishing (all p  < 0.001). The final seven-predictor model explained 51.2% of flourishing variance. Loneliness showed a small negative unique association ( β  = −0.136, p  = 0.016), acceptance/inclusion the largest positive association ( β  = 0.526, p  < 0.001), and reverse-scored rejection/exclusion a smaller positive association ( β  = 0.138, p  = 0.023); neither FoMO facet had a significant unique coefficient. Acceptance/inclusion and loneliness remained significant after explicitly relational Flourishing Scale items were removed, whereas the rejection/exclusion coefficient did not. These findings describe concurrent associations rather than a causal sequence, and they point to no specific intervention target. The cross-sectional self-report design, convenience and snowball sampling, and female-predominant sample limit causal inference and generalizability.