Gender shapes how cyberbullying fuels smartphone addiction via distress and FoMO

Adolescents who are targeted by online bullies tend to drift toward compulsive smartphone habits in the months that follow — and the pathway from victimization to addiction-like use runs through two emotional states: psychological distress and the fear of missing out. That is the central conclusion of a new longitudinal study of 965 Chinese teenagers, published in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, which also reports that every link in this chain is stronger for girls than for boys, offering one of the clearest gendered portraits yet of how digital cruelty reshapes a young person’s relationship with the device in their pocket. The research, led by psychologist Jingyu Geng of the Department of Psychology at Qingdao University’s School of Education Science, found that adolescents who reported being cyberbullied at the study’s first measurement later showed elevated distress and a heightened fear of missing out, which in turn forecast problematic smartphone use — a sequence the authors argue should change how schools, parents and clinicians approach both bullying and screen overuse.

The study drew on two waves of data from adolescents aged 14 to 17, 51 percent of them boys, with an overall average age of 15.96 years and near-identical averages for boys (15.97) and girls (15.94). At the first time point, participants completed a cybervictimization subscale, reporting how often they had been insulted, threatened, excluded or humiliated through phones and online platforms. Later, at the second time point, the same adolescents completed standardized questionnaires measuring psychological distress — a state encompassing depressive, anxious and stress-related symptoms — fear of missing out, commonly abbreviated FoMO, and problematic smartphone use, a pattern that researchers define with addiction-like criteria: loss of control over use, persistent preoccupation with the device, and continued use despite damage to sleep, schoolwork or relationships. Because the design spans two time points, it allows researchers to test directionality in a way cross-sectional surveys cannot: when victimization measured first predicts phone problems measured second, the temporal arrow points from bullying toward the compulsive behavior rather than the reverse.

The significance of the question is hard to overstate. Cyberbullying is among the most intensively studied stressors of modern adolescence, and meta-analytic reviews synthesizing dozens of studies have tied it to depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal ideation and substance use, with girls often bearing a heavier psychological toll. Its relationship with problematic smartphone use, however, has received comparatively little attention — even though the smartphone is typically both the arena in which the abuse unfolds and the object adolescents reach for when they are hurting. Earlier research had connected peer victimization and cyberbullying to problematic internet use more broadly, and one Chinese study traced reciprocal longitudinal links between peer victimization and mobile phone addiction through depression. What remained unclear was whether cyberbullying victimization specifically forecasts problematic smartphone use over time, and whether the strength of that link differs between girls and boys. The new study was designed to close both gaps at once.

To explain the mechanism, the authors anchored their predictions in two complementary theories. General strain theory holds that mistreatment generates negative emotional states — anger, depression, anxiety — and that people cope with this strain in ways that can include escapist or excessive behavior. Compensatory internet use theory extends that logic to screens: the device becomes a coping tool, a means of regulating unpleasant emotions by escaping into apps, feeds and messaging. Fear of missing out adds a second, more socially tuned engine. Defined in the research literature as the apprehension that others are having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, FoMO binds distress to compulsive checking. A distressed teenager cannot simply log off, because staying offline feels like abandoning the social world — and, painfully, the very platforms where the humiliation occurred remain the primary windows into that world. The model therefore predicts a chain: victimization breeds distress, distress breeds FoMO, and both states push use from habitual to harmful.

Methodologically, the team estimated a longitudinal mediation framework, the standard design for testing whether an effect travels through intermediate variables. In this architecture, cyberbullying victimization is the predictor, psychological distress and FoMO are parallel mediators assessed at the second time point, and problematic smartphone use is the outcome. The indirect pathways were tested with bootstrapping, the resampling procedure recommended for mediation analysis, and model quality was evaluated with fit statistics drawn from the structural equation modeling literature the authors cite, including the comparative fit index and the root mean square error of approximation. To probe gender differences, the researchers compared the strength of each path across boys and girls, asking whether the links from victimization to distress, from victimization to FoMO, and from both states to smartphone problems differed systematically by sex. This combination of longitudinal ordering, parallel mediation and gender comparison is what gives the study its explanatory leverage over earlier cross-sectional work.

The results followed the predicted script. Adolescents who reported more cybervictimization at the first wave showed significantly higher psychological distress and stronger fear of missing out at the second wave, and both of those states, in turn, predicted more problematic smartphone use. The total effect of being cyberbullied on later phone problems was thus carried substantially by two indirect routes: an emotional-pain route in which victimization bred distress that sought relief in the device, and a social-vigilance route in which victimization bred FoMO that drove compulsive monitoring. Critically, the gender comparisons showed that the associations of cyberbullying victimization with psychological distress, with FoMO, and with problematic smartphone use were all stronger for girls than for boys. In the authors’ reading, distress and FoMO are pivotal mechanisms linking victimization to problematic phone use — and they are especially decisive among female victims, for whom each step of the cascade runs steeper.

Why would girls be more vulnerable? The authors and the broader literature point to converging explanations. Research on self-construal suggests that girls more often define themselves through relationships, so social exclusion and online humiliation strike closer to the core of identity. Studies of interpersonal dependence find that reliance on relationships is tied to depression more strongly in women than in men, and analyses of adolescent samples show that the psychological aftermath of cyber and traditional bullying — psychological symptoms, self-harm, suicidality — is consistently heavier for girls. Girls also tend to invest more heavily in the social media environments where victimization happens, which raises the emotional price of disengaging. When the social world is both the source of injury and the repository of identity, the fear of missing out stops being a personality quirk and becomes a rational response to a threatened self — one that keeps a girl’s thumb hovering over the screen long after the attack has ended.

The FoMO pathway deserves particular attention because it contains a paradox that adults often misread. After being bullied online, many victims keep returning to the platforms where the abuse occurred — checking whether humiliating content has spread, who has viewed it, what the comment sections say, whether the attack has resumed. Each check briefly resolves uncertainty, and that fleeting relief reinforces the checking loop, in much the way anxiety-driven compulsions strengthen with repetition. Prior two-wave panel research has found that FoMO and problematic smartphone use feed each other bidirectionally, and survey work across countries has repeatedly linked depression and anxiety to problematic phone use through FoMO. In the victim’s daily life, the smartphone becomes simultaneously the weapon and the refuge: the medium of the attack and the only place to monitor, and perhaps manage, its aftermath. That duality helps explain why victims’ phone use escalates rather than collapses, and why simple screen-time limits so often fail.

The practical implications cut against simple solutions. Confiscating phones does nothing to dismantle the emotional machinery driving the behavior; distress and FoMO will find another outlet. The authors instead argue for prevention and intervention strategies that reduce emotional distress and fear of missing out among cyberbullying victims — school counseling and cognitive-behavioral support for the distress pathway, alongside efforts to loosen adolescents’ conviction that constant connection is socially mandatory for the FoMO pathway. Evidence-based anti-bullying programs that improve school climate remain the first line of defense, since preventing victimization prevents everything downstream. The study also carries a diagnostic message for adults: a sudden escalation in phone use after signs of online victimization is not mere defiance or addiction in isolation, but a barometer of unprocessed social pain, and in girls it may be the loudest such signal. The work was conducted within a project on AI-powered identification and intervention for adolescent cyberbullying funded by the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (grant ZR2025QC792).

The authors are candid about limits. Two measurement waves cannot fully rule out reciprocal effects, all data came from adolescent self-reports, and the sample was drawn from China, so cultural context may shape both bullying dynamics and smartphone norms; replication across regions and longer time spans remains necessary. Boys were affected too — the pathways ran in the same direction, only less steeply — so the gender finding concerns magnitude rather than absence. The research was reviewed and approved by an institutional ethics committee, and it arrives at a moment when adolescents’ social lives have migrated almost entirely onto devices and clinicians increasingly confront problematic smartphone use as a standalone complaint. Its central reframing is quietly consequential: compulsive phone use after cyberbullying is less a technology problem than an emotional one, and among girls the signal is louder. Treat the pain, the authors suggest, and the grip of the screen may begin to loosen.