Problematic Social Media Use and Alienation in Young Adults: Examining the Roles of Emotional Dysregulation and Spiritual Well-Being

Abstract

An excessive use of social media has been attributed to many problems associated with mental health such as alienation in young adults. This relationship has usually been mediated via emotional dysregulation which further exaggerates the adverse consequences of social media overuse. The concept of spiritual well-being has been suggested as one of the potential moderators of such adverse outcomes. The study investigates how problematic social media usage impacts alienation through emotional dysregulation, with spiritual well-being moderating this relationship. It is grounded in Lazarus's Cognitive Appraisal Theory, which explores the interplay between stress, coping, and emotional responses. This correlational study was conducted with 208 university students aged 18-25, recruited through convenience sampling from public and private institutions. To examine the effects of moderated mediation, conditional process analysis was conducted on Hayes (2013) PROCESS macro (Model 5). The employed scales were Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (Andreassen et al., 2016), Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale Short Form (Kaufman et al., 2016), the Alienation Scale (Dean, 1961) or the FACIT-Sp Spiritual Well-Being Scale (Ahmed et al., 2022). To verify the significance of the indirect effects, the bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples was used. Findings suggested that emotional dysregulation partially mediated the association between problematic social media usage and alienation. In addition, moderation analysis showed that spiritual well-being was a significant moderator in this relationship. At lower levels of spiritual well-being, the indirect effect of problematic social media usage on alienation through emotional dysregulation was stronger, while at higher levels of spiritual well-being, this effect was weaker. This study underscores the need for integrating spiritual and emotional health into mental health programs, especially in populations with high digital consumption.

Keywords: Alienation, emotional dysregulation, spiritual well-being, problematic social media usage.