ArticleBMC public health2025
The impact of social media addiction on depression among university students in Wuhan, China: a longitudinal study.
Article in BMC public health, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mediating Effect of Perceived Ageism Experiences Between TikTok Addiction Symptoms and Psychological Distress: A Cross-Sectional Study.Health science reports · 2026Article
- The Mediating Role of Interpersonal Needs in Perceived Parenting Styles and Social Media Addiction Among University Students: Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Social media addiction in five major mental disorders: a cross-sectional comparative study.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- The effect of physical exercise on social appearance anxiety among college students: the serial mediating role of social media addiction and self-objectification.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Predicting student mental health through entropy-based features and interpretable cross-attention transformer networks.PloS one · 2026Article
- Effects of social media use on depressive symptoms among Chinese university students: the mediating roles of self-esteem and social support.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
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Abstract
objectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate the association between social media addiction and depression among university students of different genders in Wuhan, China, and also to explore the effect of social support on depression in the context of social media addiction.
methodsThree waves (2020–2023) of psychological optimism and health data were analyzed. In all waves, 1,215 university students aged 16 to 22 years provided the data. Statistical analyses included constructing single- and multi-group latent growth curve models.
resultsOf the 1215 participants, 748 (61.6%) were girls. Throughout the single-group latent growth curve model, girls had lower depression scores at baseline (i=-0.099, Z = -2.842) and increased linearly over time (s=-0.121, Z = -2.377). Throughout the single-group latent growth curve model, boys had higher depression scores at baseline (i = 3.506, Z = -2.612), and increased linearly over time (s=-1.229, Z = 0.210),while girls had lower depression scores at baseline (i = 0.345, Z = 0.289), and increased linearly over time (s = 0.336, Z = 0.414). Social media addiction was associated with depression scores for both genders across all time periods. The coefficients for boys on social media at each of the three points in time were 3.272; 4.904; 9.522. The coefficients for girls on social media at each of the three points in time were 5.521; 4.406; 6.001. Social support and depression were related for girls with coefficients at the first time point of -0.208 and coefficients at the third time point of-0.258.
conclusionThe findings suggest that social media addiction is associated with higher depression scores among university students. Male students’ social support was not associated with depression. In contrast, social support for female students was associated with lower depression scores in the first and third years of university.
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