Research On Attention Bias Characteristics And Intervention Of University Students Addicted To Social Media

Social media has become an essential tool for daily communication among university students due to its unique advantages.However,irrational and excessive use of social media can lead to social media addiction.According to incentive sensitization theory and negative reinforcement emotional processing theory,addicts’ attentional bias towards addiction-related cues and negative emotional information plays a crucial role in triggering,maintaining,and perpetuating addictive behaviors.Substance addiction and behavioral addiction are often accompanied by strong physiological dependence and withdrawal symptoms,while social media addiction tends to involve more psychological dependence and intense cravings.Whether social media addicts share common addictive mechanisms with other addictions,and whether interventions targeting these mechanisms can help reduce risks of social media addiction,are important questions that researchers are focusing on.This study takes social media addiction as a research problem and conducts a series of studies starting from the cognitive factor of attentional bias.This study is divided into five parts,including seven studies:The first part of the study,Study 1,mainly uses questionnaires to investigate and analyze the current situation of social media addiction.The results show that social media addiction levels among university students is at an upper-medium level,with the highest score for the withdrawal symptom dimension and the lowest score for the salience dimension.We Chat has become the most commonly used social media platform among university students,and the prevalence of social media addiction in the study sample was 2.9%.Among demographic factors,gender has a significant impact on social media addiction,while age,place of birth and whether one is an only child have no significant impact on social media addiction.The second part of the study,Study 2,mainly discusses the influencing factors of social media addiction.It used a regression model to explore whether demographic factors,impulsivity,self-esteem,mood(anxiety,depression,social fear,and loneliness),and negative attention bias were potentially risk or protective factors associated with social media addiction.The results show that females are more prone to social media addiction than males.Impulsivity,anxiety,social fear and negative attention bias are risk factors for social media addiction,and high self-esteem is protective factor for social media addiction.The third part of the study,namely Study 3,primarily investigated the impact pathway of negative attention bias on social media addiction.The results showed that negative attention bias not only directly predicts social media addiction,but also indirectly affects social media addiction through the mediating effects of anxiety and social fear.The forth part of the study,namely Study 4 and Study 5,mainly explored the attention bias characteristics of university students addicted to social media towards social media-related cues and negative emotional information.In Study 4,two experimental tasks,the addiction Stroop task and addiction dot-probe task,were used to investigate whether social media addicted university students show attention bias towards social media-related cues and the relationship between social media addiction levels and attention bias towards social media-related cues.The results showed that in the dot-probe task,compared to the social media normal use group,the social media addicted group exhibited attention bias towards social media-related cues,and the social media addiction was positively correlated with the attention bias scores towards social media-related cues.This means that the more severe an individual’s social media addiction level is,the more their attention resources are captured by social mediarelated information.However,in the Stroop task,no significant differences were found between the social media addicted group and the social media normal use group in terms of attention bias towards social media-related information,and there was no significant correlation between the social media addiction levels and attention bias.In Study 5,an emotion Stroop task and emotion dot-probe task were used to explore the attention bias of social media addicted university students towards negative emotions and the relationship between social media addiction levels and attention bias towards negative emotions.The results showed that social media addicted university students exhibited attention bias towards negative emotional information in the emotion dotprobe task,and social media addiction levels were positively correlated with the attention bias scores towards negative emotional information.This means that the more severe an individual’s social media addiction is,the more easily they are captured by negative emotional information.No significant attention bias effects were observed in the emotion Stroop task,and there was no significant correlation between social media addiction levels and attention bias scores towards negative emotions.The fifth part of the study,namely Study 6 and Study 7,which mainly use attention bias modification training to intervene in social media addiction.In study 6,it mainly used attention bias modification training for social media cues to intervene university students with social media addiction,and explore the short-term and long-term intervention effects of this method.The results show that after attention bias modification training for social media cues,the attention bias of addicted individuals towards social media-related stimuli shifted from attention bias towards attention avoidance,leading to a decrease in social media addiction levels,and the training effects were still effective two weeks and four weeks after the training.In Study 7,it mainly used emotional attention bias modification training to intervene in university students with social media addiction,and explores the shortterm and long-term intervention effects of this method on the negative attention bias,negative emotions and social media addiction levels in university students with social media addiction.The results showed that after emotional attention bias modification training,social media addicts’ attention bias to negative emotional information changed from attention bias to attention avoidance,and negative emotions decreased,which was still effective 2 weeks after training and 4 weeks after training,but this method did not have a significant impact on social media addiction levels.Further research and interventions are still needed to better understand and respond to the problem of social media addiction.This study explores the attention bias characteristics of university students on social media,analyzes the short-term and long-term intervention effects of attention bias modification training,and proposes educational strategies from individual,family,school,and society.It is of great research significance and value for a deeper understanding of the mechanism of social media addiction,the formulation of intervention measures,and the promotion of psychological health education practices for university students.