Executive Function and Social Media Addiction in Female College Students: The Mediating Role of Affective State and Stress

Abstract

Social media addiction is the emerging occurrence in which individuals develop psychological dependencies on microblog, wechat, Tik Tok and so on. Existing research has demonstrated the possible relationship between mobile social media addiction and disordered eating attitudes/behavior. In this study, we investigated the relationship between executive function, especially food-inhibitory control, affective state/stress, and mobile social media addiction among female college students as all play predictive roles in food addiction. A structural equation model was used to examine the mediation model hypothesis, and the results confirmed the mediating role of affective state and stress between executive function, especially inhibitory control over high-calorie food, and mobile social media addiction among Chinese female college students. The results verify the correlation between social media addiction and disordered eating attitudes/behavior from the perspective of psychological mechanisms. These proposals emphasize the significance of improving inhibitory control over high-calorie food and the importance of providing psychological counseling to intervene in negative emotions and stress management in female college students.

Keywords:

• Executive function
• social media addiction
• female college students
• affective state
• stress

Compliance with ethical standards

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no conflict of interest associated in this study.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of Biomedical Ethics Committee of the Medical Department of Xi’an Jiaotong University

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data availability statement

The data used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Social Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2020M007) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M683444).