How Controlling Parents and Social Media Comparisons Shape College Students’ Anxiety and Depression

A new study published in Scientific Reports offers one of the most detailed maps to date of how the emotional fingerprints of childhood parenting follow young people into university, and how the social media feeds they scroll every day can either soften or sharpen that legacy. Drawing on questionnaire data from 1,026 Chinese college students, researchers Wenmin Li of Taiyuan University and Jin Meng and Yiqi Liu of South China Normal University constructed a statistical model that traces a pathway from parental psychological control to stress, anxiety, and depression, with interpersonal sensitivity acting as the crucial middle link and upward social comparison on social media altering the strength of that pathway at several points along the way.

Parental psychological control is a specific and well-studied parenting style, distinct from ordinary discipline or oversight. It refers to attempts to shape a child’s inner world: guilt induction, conditional approval, love withdrawal, shaming, and intrusive interference with the child’s thoughts and feelings. Decades of research have linked it to internalizing problems, the family of conditions that includes depression, anxiety, and stress-related distress, which turn inward rather than erupting outward in aggression or defiance. What has been less clear is the mechanism, the invisible chain that carries the effect of a controlling household into the dormitories and lecture halls of early adulthood, and the conditions under which that chain tightens or loosens.

The new study addresses that gap with a moderated mediation model, a statistical framework that allows researchers to test both an indirect pathway and the boundary conditions that modify it. The participants, 56.53 percent of whom were male, averaged 20.28 years of age with a standard deviation of 1.09, placing them squarely in the developmental window of emerging adulthood. Each completed validated questionnaires measuring perceived parental psychological control, interpersonal sensitivity, upward social comparison on social media, and the three core dimensions of internalizing problems: stress, anxiety, and depression. The study received ethical approval from the School of Psychology at South China Normal University and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The first finding confirmed the expected baseline: parental psychological control was positively associated with all three dimensions of internalizing problems. Students who reported more controlling parenting reported more stress, more anxiety, and more depressive symptoms. But the model’s real contribution lies in what it found between those endpoints. Interpersonal sensitivity, the tendency to feel easily hurt, self-conscious, and anxious about criticism and social evaluation, accounted for a significant indirect association between parental psychological control and each dimension of internalizing distress. In other words, part of the reason controlling parenting predicts emotional suffering in college is that it appears to cultivate a heightened vulnerability to the judgments of others.

This mediating role makes developmental sense. Children raised under psychological control often learn that love and approval are conditional, that their feelings may be dismissed or weaponized against them, and that scrutiny is constant. Such an environment can train a young person to monitor social cues with anxious intensity, to read criticism into neutral interactions, and to treat interpersonal evaluation as a threat. When those individuals arrive at university, a setting dense with social comparison, new relationships, and evaluative pressure, that hypervigilant interpersonal style becomes a conduit through which academic and social stressors convert into anxiety, stress, and depression.

The study’s most provocative contribution, however, concerns the digital layer. The researchers measured upward social comparison on social media, the habit of comparing oneself to the seemingly superior lives, achievements, and appearances displayed in other people’s posts. This variable did not behave uniformly across the model. Instead, it moderated, or changed the strength of, several different links in the causal chain, sometimes in opposing directions, a pattern the authors describe as offering targeted intervention ideas for college mental health education in the digital media era.

Specifically, upward social comparison on social media negatively moderated the association between parental psychological control and interpersonal sensitivity, as well as the direct associations between parental psychological control and both stress and depression. In statistical terms, a negative moderation means that as upward comparison increased, the strength of these associations decreased. Students who engaged heavily in upward comparison showed a somewhat weaker link between controlling parenting and interpersonal sensitivity, and a weaker direct link between controlling parenting and their stress and depression levels. The authors do not claim that social comparison is protective in any simple sense; rather, the pattern suggests that the pathway from parenting to distress is not fixed, and that individual differences in social media behavior are entangled with how early family experiences translate into adult symptoms.

Yet the same variable acted in the opposite direction at a different junction. Upward social comparison on social media positively moderated the association between interpersonal sensitivity and stress. For students already high in interpersonal sensitivity, more frequent upward comparison was associated with a stronger connection between that sensitivity and their stress levels. This asymmetry is the study’s most striking technical result: the same behavior weakens some links in the chain while strengthening another. It suggests that social comparison is not a single lever with a single effect but a context-dependent process whose consequences depend on where in the psychological pathway a person stands.

For the growing audience of readers who follow psychology research online, the findings land at the intersection of two viral conversations: the long shadow of controlling parenting and the mental health costs of social media. The study resists a simplistic verdict on either. It does not say that social media is uniformly harmful or that it repairs the damage of difficult childhoods. Instead, it shows that the digital and familial environments interact, and that understanding a student’s distress requires looking both backward at the parenting they received and forward at the feeds they consume. The authors argue that their findings provide targeted intervention ideas, implying that mental health programs for college students might be more effective if they address interpersonal sensitivity and social comparison habits alongside family history rather than treating each factor in isolation.

Several caveats frame the work appropriately. The data are cross-sectional, collected through a single questionnaire survey, which means the model describes statistical associations rather than proven causal sequences; longitudinal and experimental designs would be needed to confirm the direction of the pathways. The sample was drawn from Chinese universities, and parenting norms and social media cultures vary across societies, so generalization requires care. All measures were self-reported, leaving room for shared-method bias. The authors declare no competing interests and received no external funding for the study. Even with these limitations, the research adds a technically sophisticated piece to the puzzle of emerging adult mental health, showing that the road from a controlling household to anxiety and depression runs through interpersonal sensitivity, and that the traffic on that road is partly governed by how young people compare themselves to the curated lives glowing on their screens.

Subject of Research: The association between parental psychological control and internalizing problems among college students, mediated by interpersonal sensitivity and moderated by upward social comparison on social media

Article Title: A moderated mediation model of the association between parental psychological control and internalizing problems among college students

Article References: Li, W., Meng, J., & Liu, Y. (2026). A moderated mediation model of the association between parental psychological control and internalizing problems among college students. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-75982-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-75982-3

Keywords: parental psychological control, internalizing problems, interpersonal sensitivity, upward social comparison, social media, college students, depression, anxiety, stress, moderated mediation, mental health, emerging adulthood