Fear of Missing out, Problematic Social Media use and Anxiety among Pakistani University Students: A Cross-Sectional Correlational Study

Abstract

The anxiety of being left out of enjoyable activities that one is not participating in, known as fear of missing out (FoMO), is associated with greater social media use and usage, and negatively correlates with emotional functioning. There is little evidence in South Asian university populations, and most studies focus on individual relationships, not all three. A cross-sectional correlational study was conducted with 500 undergraduate students (M age = 22.2 years, SD = 1.65) from University of Gujrat, Pakistan who were recruited through convenience sampling and filled out the Fear of Missing out Scale, the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale and the Beck Anxiety Inventory. Because scores departed from normality, associations were examined with Spearman’s rank correlations, supplemented by a simple linear regression and Mann–Whitney U comparisons by family system. FoMO correlated positively with social media addiction (ρ = .256, p < .001) and with anxiety (ρ = .370, p < .001), while social media addiction showed a weak association with anxiety (ρ = .114, p = .011). In a bivariate regression, social media addiction accounted for 5.1% of the variance in FoMO (β = .226, p < .001). The differences between nuclear and joint families were small, with nuclear families scoring higher than joint families on the measures of anxiety and FoMO (p = .002 and p = .039 respectively) but not on the social media addiction (p = .202). In this sample, FoMO was always reported to be correlated with problematic social media use, as well as anxiety, and the correlation with anxiety was larger. The design did not provide any temporal ordering or causality, and the raw scores on the anxiety measure were very high, and should be interpreted with care.