The role of maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies and social anxiety in problematic smartphone and social media use

Abstract It has been shown that individuals who are highly socially anxious prefer computer-mediated communication over face-to-face communication possibly due to the control and social liberation that it provides. Yet, little is known about transdiagnostic psychopathology constructs as mediators that may help understand this relationship. In the present study, our goal was to investigate the extent to which maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies mediate the relationship between social anxiety, problematic social networking (SNS) site and smartphone use (PSU). A total of 499 participants filled out our survey including measures of social anxiety, emotion regulation strategies, social media and smartphone addiction. We used structural equation modeling to test the indirect and direct effects between the variables. We found that maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (rumination, catastrophizing, self-blame and other blame) mediated the relationship between social anxiety and both problematic SNS use and PSU. The direct effect between social anxiety and problematic SNS use was also significant. We show that emotion regulation is a key factor in developing problematic and SNS use. Further, we argue that a smartphone could serve as an external tool for emotion regulation which could, in turn, lead to problematic SNS use. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.