The relationship between negative life events and wechat addiction among chinese college students: the roles of maladaptive cognition toward wechat and rumination.

LIFE change events; RUMINATION (Cognition); SOCIAL media; CHINESE-speaking students; COLLEGE students; PEARSON correlation (Statistics)

As the largest and most widely used social media platform in China, WeChat could bring convenience to people's lives, while over-reliance on the use of WeChat has harmed personal physical and mental health to a certain extent. WeChat addiction has aroused widespread concern in academic circles. Although prior studies have found that negative life events were the main antecedents of WeChat addiction, little is known about the underlying psychological mechanisms. This study proposed a moderated mediation model focusing on the roles of maladaptive cognition toward WeChat and rumination to clarify the mechanism underlying the relationship between negative life events and WeChat addiction in Chinese college students. A total of 892 Chinese college students (59.90% females; Mage = 18.80 ± 1.10) completed measures including negative life events, WeChat addiction, maladaptive cognition toward WeChat, and rumination. The SPSS 23.0 was used for descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation analyses, the SPSS macro PROCESS was used to test the mediating effects of maladaptive cognition and the moderating of rumination. After controlling for gender and age, maladaptive cognition toward WeChat mediated the relation between negative life events and WeChat addiction, while rumination moderated the effects of negative life events on maladaptive cognition toward WeChat. Specifically, the effect of negative life events on maladaptive cognition toward WeChat was stronger for college students with higher rumination than for those with lower rumination. The implications of our findings shed light on WeChat addiction in college students and can help clinical workers to prevent WeChat addiction behavior more efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Current Psychology is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)