Predictors of TikTok Addiction among University Students: The Contributions of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and Academic Stress

he surging popularity of TikTok among university students has raised serious scholarly concerns regarding the escalation of digital behavioral addiction and its detrimental impacts on higher education outcomes. Aims and scope of paper: This study aims to investigate the concurrent and partial contributions of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and academic stress as predictors of TikTok addiction among undergraduate higher education students. Employing an associative quantitative design with a cross-sectional approach, this study involved 54 active students selected via purposive sampling based on specific digital intensity and institutional criteria. Data were gathered using three validated Likert-model psychological instruments: the FoMO Scale, the Student Academic Stress Scale (SASS), and the Social Media Addiction Scale (SMAS), and further analyzed using multiple linear regression via SPSS 25. The partial analysis (t-test) indicated that FoMO has a highly potent, positive, and significant predictive effect on TikTok addiction (p=0.000). Conversely, academic stress partially has no significant effect on TikTok addiction (p=0.601), reflecting students' task orientation and self-regulated learning capacity in isolating academic pressure from digital procrastination. Nevertheless, the simultaneous estimation (F-test) confirmed that both variables collectively contribute a massive 70.6% to the variance of TikTok addiction (p=0.000). This study concludes that TikTok addiction is a multivariate phenomenon primarily driven by internal interpersonal anxiety (FoMO) and reinforced by the academic environment. The findings underscore the urgency for university counseling services to design specific group interventions focused on strengthening digital self-control and reducing digital social anxiety among students rather than merely reducing academic workloads.