Social anxiety predicts social media addiction through resilience and perceived stress among Turkish university students

Social Media Addiction (SMA) is a common problem that can lead to various negative consequences in individuals’ academic, professional, and personal lives. This study is structured based on the I-PACE (Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution) model, which explains how an individual’s dispositions, affective reactions, and cognitive processes interact with addictive behaviors. Within the framework of this model, the effects of social anxiety (“personal factor”) on SMA (“behavioral outcome”) were examined through psychological resilience (“affect” component) and perceived stress, which reflects individuals’ cognitive appraisal of demands relative to coping resources (“cognition” component), using a sequential mediation model. The study sample consisted of 463 Turkish university students (75.4% female, 24.6% male), with women comprising the majority of the sample. Participants completed valid and reliable scales measuring social anxiety, psychological resilience, perceived stress, and SMA. The data obtained were analyzed using Hayes’ PROCESS Macro Model 6. The analysis demonstrated that social anxiety influences SMA both directly and indirectly. While psychological resilience significantly decreased perceived stress, perceived stress was found to be a variable that positively predicts SMA. Although psychological resilience alone was not a significant mediator, the sequential pathway was significant: lower resilience predicted higher perceived stress, which in turn increased SMA. These findings suggest that an individual’s psychological vulnerabilities are influential in the development of digital addictions, not only directly but also through internal regulation processes. When evaluated within the multilevel structure of the I-PACE model, social anxiety indirectly shapes addictive behaviors by affecting an individual’s affective (resilience) and cognitive (perceived stress) regulation capacity. Resilience alone did not mediate the association between social anxiety and social media addiction; instead, a sequential pathway via perceived stress emerged, extending the I-PACE framework by linking affective and cognitive mechanisms in a single model. Accordingly, it is suggested that interventions aimed at increasing psychological resilience and improving stress-coping skills may effectively reduce the risk of SMA.