Why You Use Social Media May Matter More Than How Long You Use It

When people score high on questionnaires measuring social media “addiction,” the hours they spend scrolling may be only part of the story. A new exploratory study from researchers at Sigmund Freud Private University in Vienna suggests that what social media is used for, and how users interpret their own behavior in light of public warnings and social judgments, are strongly associated with self-reported addiction-like symptoms, sometimes far more than raw screen time.

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, was led by Mario Lehenbauer-Baum and colleagues in the Department of Clinical Psychology. The team recruited 291 social media users through Instagram and Facebook between December 2025 and February 2026, asking them to complete the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS), report their weekly usage, and answer two newly developed questionnaires. One questionnaire probed the psychological functions social media serves for each user; the other examined what the researchers call discourse-related self-appraisals, meaning how people evaluate their own use in relation to public narratives about screen time, digital detox, and social media addiction.

The BSMAS is a self-report instrument built on classical addiction criteria: salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. Higher scores indicate stronger endorsement of addiction-like symptoms, but the authors stress that the scale does not establish a clinical diagnosis. The average participant in this sample was about 29 years old, reported roughly 21.7 hours of social media use per week, and the sample skewed toward relatively engaged users because recruitment happened entirely on social platforms themselves.

Using exploratory factor analysis on their new Functional SM Use Survey, the researchers identified five distinct motivational domains: emotional self-regulatory engagement and escapism; global wellbeing benefit; entertainment and stimulation-driven engagement; instrumental and goal-directed use; and social validation and self-presentation. Items in the first domain included statements such as using social media to escape stressful situations or to feel better able to cope with difficult emotions. The wellbeing domain captured whether users felt the platforms supported their overall daily life, while the instrumental domain covered information seeking, inspiration, and discovering new interests.

The Discourse-Based Survey yielded three separate domains. The first, socially driven self-judgment, captured whether people wonder if their use is excessive because others see it that way, or whether they worry about meeting criteria for “social media addiction” without knowing what those criteria are. The second, warning-triggered self-appraisal, reflected reactions to screen-time statistics, app notifications, and expert warnings. The third, perceived over-pathologization and normative dissent, captured skepticism toward narratives that label ordinary media use as problematic, with items suggesting society exaggerates the dangers of social media.

The statistical results were striking. In a simple correlation, weekly social media use was positively associated with BSMAS scores, but only moderately so (r = 0.28). The strongest bivariate association by far was with emotional self-regulatory engagement and escapism (r = 0.62), followed by warning-triggered self-appraisal (r = 0.55) and socially driven self-judgment (r = 0.47). Perceived wellbeing benefit showed essentially no association with addiction-like symptom scores at all (r = 0.05).

In a hierarchical regression, weekly use entered alone explained 7.7 percent of the variance in BSMAS scores. Adding the three discourse domains raised explained variance to 35.1 percent, at which point weekly use was no longer statistically significant. When the five functional domains were added in the final step, the model explained 49.8 percent of the variance overall, and only two predictors remained significant: emotional self-regulatory engagement and escapism (β = 0.438) and warning-triggered self-appraisal (β = 0.273). Time spent online, in other words, lost its unique association once motives and self-appraisals were taken into account.

The authors did not stop at the headline numbers. Because some of their new items conceptually overlap with BSMAS content, they ran three sensitivity analyses. Removing discourse items that explicitly mentioned addiction or excessive use attenuated the socially driven self-judgment association, which was no longer significant in the fully adjusted overlap-reduced model. Removing the BSMAS item about negative consequences for work or studies barely changed the warning-triggered self-appraisal association (β = 0.265 versus 0.273). Removing the BSMAS mood-modification item, which asks about using social media to forget personal problems, reduced the escapism coefficient from 0.438 to 0.315 but did not eliminate it.

These sensitivity checks carry an important caution. The researchers emphasize that the analyses do not establish conceptual independence between the new domains and the BSMAS, nor do they show that public discourse causes addiction-like symptoms or that elevated symptom scores are mere artifacts of cultural narratives. Warning-triggered self-appraisal is inherently close to self-perceived problematic use, and coping-oriented use shares affective content with the scale’s mood-modification component. The findings indicate associations, not causal pathways, and the cross-sectional design cannot determine whether coping-oriented use precedes symptom endorsement or follows from it.

The limitations are considerable. All measures were self-reported within a single survey session, inflating the risk of shared method variance; weekly use was a retrospective estimate rather than device-recorded behavior; the survey order was fixed rather than randomized; and both new instruments were developed and tested in the same sample, so their factor structures remain provisional. The convenience sample, recruited through social media and limited to English speakers, cannot represent the broader population or people with clinically significant impairment. Still, the study raises a measurement question with real consequences: when people endorse addiction-like symptoms on questionnaires, their answers may reflect not only how social media functions in their lives but also how they interpret their own behavior against a cultural backdrop saturated with warnings about screens. Disentangling those threads, the authors argue, will require objective usage data, longitudinal designs, and independent measures of impairment in future research.

Subject of Research: Associations between functional motives, discourse-related self-appraisals, and self-reported social media addiction-like symptoms

Article Title: Beyond time spent online: exploring functional motives, discourse-related self-appraisals, and social media addiction-like symptoms

Article References: Lehenbauer-Baum, M., Klaps, A., Kovacovsky, Z., & Stetina, B. U. (2026). Beyond time spent online: exploring functional motives, discourse-related self-appraisals, and social media addiction-like symptoms. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1875894. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1875894

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1875894

Keywords: social media, behavioral addiction, BSMAS, escapism, screen time, self-appraisal, emotion regulation, media psychology, exploratory factor analysis, digital wellbeing, problematic use, pilot study