Abstract
With the rapid expansion of online socializing, social media fatigue has become increasingly common among users. Envy and admiration are very common emotions in online social interactions. We usually consider envy a negative emotion and admiration a positive emotion. Nevertheless, does envy inevitably increase social media fatigue? Does admiration always alleviate social media fatigue? To answer these questions, this paper explores the impacts of two forms of envy (i.e., benign envy and malicious envy) and two forms of admiration (i.e., elevation and skill admiration) on social media fatigue through the mediators of social media loneliness and social media anxiety. The data were collected from 581 WeChat users, and the results showed that benign envy aggravated social media fatigue through the mediator of social media anxiety, while malicious envy aggravated social media fatigue through the mediators of both social media loneliness and anxiety. However, although admiration is often considered a positive emotion, it does not always have a positive effect. Elevation relieved social media fatigue through the mediator of social media loneliness, while skill admiration aggravated social media fatigue through the mediator of social media anxiety. Overall, the findings offer useful implications for alleviating social media fatigue.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Code Availability
SPSS 21.0, Stata 12.0 and Amos 21.0 were used to analyses the data.
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This research was funded by The National Social Science Fund of China, (grant number 17AGL026).
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Yan, Q., Chen, Y., Jiang, Y. et al. Exploring the impact of envy and admiration on social media fatigue: Social media loneliness and anxiety as mediators. Curr Psychol 42, 16830–16843 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02904-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02904-7