ABSTRACT

Fear of missing out (FoMO) is a prevalent phenomenon associated with a range of mental health symptoms, such as depression and anxiety. To our knowledge, the question of whether FoMO can be explained by other well-known mechanistic variables—namely, loneliness, rumination, and anxiety sensitivity (AS) – has not been previously evaluated. The current study investigated the predictive power of loneliness, rumination, and AS for explaining variance in FoMO within two independent samples of undergraduate students at a large Northeastern university. Participants completed an online battery of questionnaires. In Study 1, it was found that loneliness and rumination offered significant prediction of FoMO when AS was not considered in the model; however, when these three predictors were considered together, only AS offered significant, non-redundant prediction. Study 2 revealed that both rumination and AS offered significant prediction of FoMO, with AS offering stronger unique prediction. Such findings provide a new frame for understanding the nature of the relatively new concept of FoMO, and in particular, suggest that it may be important to consider AS and rumination in future studies.

摘要

害怕错过 (FoMO) 是一种与一系列心理健康症状相关的普遍现象，例如抑郁和焦虑。据我们所知，FoMO 是否可以用其他众所周知的机制变量——即孤独、反刍和焦虑敏感性 (AS)——来解释的问题之前没有被评估过。本研究调查了东北一所大型大学本科生的两个独立样本中孤独感、反刍思维和 AS 对解释 FoMO 差异的预测能力。参与者完成了一系列在线问卷调查。在研究 1 中，发现当模型中未考虑 AS 时，孤独和反刍对 FoMO 提供了显着的预测；然而，当这三个预测因素一起考虑时，只有 AS 提供了显着的，非冗余预测。研究 2 表明，反刍和 AS 都对 FoMO 提供了重要的预测，而 AS 提供了更强的独特预测。这些发现为理解 FoMO 这个相对较新的概念的性质提供了一个新框架，特别是表明在未来的研究中考虑 AS 和反刍可能很重要。