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Background: It still remains unclear whether problematic social media use (PSMU) is a cause or a consequence of psychological distress. The present study aimed to investigate the temporal relationships between PSMU and psychological distress through a three-wave panel study (between April and July 2020, with an interval of 1 month between each period of time)., Methods: 3,912 adult Italian participants were surveyed during the COVID-19 pandemic for psychological distress (Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale) and PSMU (Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale). Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models were applied to disaggregate between-person from within-person associations as regards PSMU and an individual's distress., Results: On a between-person level we found that adults with higher PSMU also reported heightened levels of psychological distress across the three waves. However, on a within-person level, no cross-lagged associations were found between changes in distress and subsequent changes in PSMU and vice versa. The results were largely unchanged with the inclusion of participants' gender and age or COVID-19-related fears as covariates, and when the three subscales of depression, anxiety and stress were examined in separate models., Conclusions: The current study suggests that the link between PSMU and psychological distress is mainly driven by trait-like differences and not by state-like individual changes over time., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: In recent years, the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) construct has been the object of growing attention in digital technology research with previous studies finding support for the relationship between FoMO and problematic smartphone use (PSU) among adolescents and young adults. However, no previous studies clarified the causal link between FoMO and PSU using a longitudinal design., Methods: An auto-regressive, cross-lagged panel design was tested by using a longitudinal dataset with two waves of data collection (T0 and T1, one year apart). Participants included two hundred and forty-two adolescents (109 males and 133 females), with a mean age of 14.16 years, who filled out the Fear of Missing Out scale (FoMOs) and the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS). Moreover, participants filled out the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), at the first time-point of data collection., Results: The findings of the study show that FoMO (both FoMO-Fear and FoMO-Control subscales) and PSU are positively related at both time-points (i.e. at a cross-sectional level). However no cross-lagged associations between them were longitudinally supported. Females and older adolescents show higher FoMO-Fear at T1., Conclusions: The findings of the present study suggest caution when causal links between FoMO and PSU are inferred., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)