Psychological Correlates of Social Media Addiction Symptoms in Professional Athletes

Self-reported social media addiction-related symptoms were associated with self-handicapping, stress, psychological resilience and sportsmanship in a cross-sectional correlational study of 388 licensed adult professional athletes. The research, conducted in Türkiye, found that higher self-handicapping and stress were associated with higher symptom scores, whereas higher resilience and sportsmanship scores were associated with lower symptom scores. Anxiety and depression were correlated with the social media measure in bivariate analyses but did not retain significant adjusted associations when all six psychological predictors were considered together.

The participants were recruited through a convenience sample from sports clubs in Rize province and surrounding areas. They included 183 women and 205 men, aged 18 to 59, and all held professional sports contracts. Each participant completed the Social Media Addiction Scale, the Self-Handicapping Scale, the Adult Resilience Measure, the Sportsmanship Behavior Scale and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21. The researchers treated the scale scores as continuous measures rather than clinical diagnoses, and they included sportsmanship as an exploratory extension to the study of established psychological correlates of problematic social media use.

Pearson correlations showed positive associations between addiction-related symptom scores and self-handicapping, anxiety, stress and depression, as well as negative associations with psychological resilience and sportsmanship; all reported p-values were below 0.001. The researchers next fitted a simultaneous six-predictor multiple linear regression. The model accounted for 48.7% of the variance in symptom scores within the sample, with an adjusted R² of 0.479, F(6, 381) = 60.20 and p < 0.001. Self-handicapping had the strongest reported positive adjusted association, with β = 0.32 and p < 0.001, followed by stress, with β = 0.26 and p < 0.001. Psychological resilience had a negative adjusted association, with β = −0.23 and p < 0.001, and sportsmanship also had a negative association, with β = −0.14 and p = 0.001. Anxiety and depression were not statistically significant in the adjusted model.

A sensitivity analysis using HC3 heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors preserved the reported significance pattern: self-handicapping and stress remained positively associated with the symptom measure, while resilience and sportsmanship remained negatively associated. However, the robust-analysis diagnostics indicated possible functional-form misspecification, suggesting that the linear model may not fully capture some relationships in the data. The results therefore provide contextual evidence about psychological correlates among the sampled athletes, not estimates of causal effects or validated individual prediction. The cross-sectional design cannot establish the direction of the relationships, and the convenience sample limits how broadly the findings can be generalized. The authors also cautioned that the study does not identify effective intervention targets: experimental research would be needed to determine whether changing any of the measured characteristics reduces problematic social media use.

Subject of Research: Psychological correlates of self-reported social media addiction symptoms among adult professional athletes

Article Title: Understanding social media addiction among adult athletes: psychological correlates in a cross-sectional study

Article References: Kulaberoğlu, N., & Sari, S. V. (2026). Understanding social media addiction among adult athletes: psychological correlates in a cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29971-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29971-w

Keywords: social media addiction, professional athletes, self-handicapping, psychological resilience, sportsmanship, stress, anxiety, depression, cross-sectional study, Türkiye, Understanding, social