Stress, Social Anxiety, and Problematic Social Media Use: The Role of Coping Styles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problematic social media use (PSMU) is a growing concern among undergraduate students with emerging evidence linking it to elevated stress and poor mental health. However, the relationship between social anxiety and PSMU remains underexplored, especially whilst considering stress and coping. This study examines these relationships while incorporating coping styles to assess the role of emotion, avoidance, and problem-focused coping. We aim to investigate the association between perceived stress, social anxiety and PSMU, in addition to the mediating and moderating role of coping styles. A sample of 100 undergraduate students from Carleton University completed self-report measures, including the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), and the Short Survey of Coping Profile Endorsement (SCOPE). Results yielded a significant positive correlation between PSMU and emotion-focused coping and perceived stress. Linear regression analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between perceived stress and social anxiety, yet neither variable significantly predicted PSMU. Coping styles did not significantly moderate the relationship between stress and PSMU or mediate the relationship between social anxiety and PSMU. These findings suggest that the relationship between stress, social anxiety, and PSMU may be more complex and context dependent. While stress and social anxiety remain closely linked, their impact on PSMU may be moderated by other factors, such as motivation for social media use. These results underscore the need for further research to clarify the role coping styles play and the mechanisms underlying PSMU to inform targeted interventions for at-risk student populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".