Smartphone addiction has become one of the most intensively studied behavioral phenomena of the past decade, and for good reason. Systematic reviews have linked problematic smartphone use to a range of negative health outcomes in adult populations, including disturbed sleep, sedentary behavior, and psychological distress. Early research concentrated heavily on personality traits as the driving determinants, asking which dispositional characteristics make some people more vulnerable than others. More recently, however, the field has shifted toward relational variables — the quality of people’s attachments and their fear of missing out — as more proximate and more modifiable predictors. What had remained surprisingly neglected, the Italian team argues, is the role of social identity: the part of a person’s self-concept that derives from membership in social groups.

Social identity theory, rooted in the classic work of Henri Tajfel, holds that people do not merely belong to groups; they internalize group membership as part of who they are. In the digital era, this process has migrated substantially online. Young adults increasingly derive their sense of belonging, status, and self-worth from the communities they inhabit on social media platforms, from fandoms and friend groups to professional networks. Previous studies have shown that a strong online social identity predicts engagement with social networking sites and even vulnerability to other addictive behaviors, such as alcohol use when adolescents identify with peer crowds portrayed drinking online. But the mechanism connecting that identity to compulsive smartphone behavior had never been tested within a single comprehensive statistical framework alongside attachment and FoMO.

To build that framework, the researchers surveyed 760 Italian young adults with an average age of approximately 24 years. Participants completed validated measures of smartphone addiction, fear of missing out, online social identity, and attachment to both parents and peers, the latter assessed with instruments descended from the widely used Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment developed by Armsden and Greenberg. The analytical approach was a moderated mediation model, a regression-based technique associated with the work of Andrew Hayes that allows researchers to test simultaneously whether one variable transmits the effect of another (mediation) and whether a third variable changes the strength of a given pathway (moderation). Before analysis, the team checked that the distributions of the key variables met statistical assumptions, following standard practice for interpreting correlation coefficients and model estimates.

The results traced a clear causal-looking pathway, though the cross-sectional design means the direction of effects is inferred rather than proven. Young adults whose self-concept was more strongly anchored in their online social groups reported higher levels of smartphone addiction — but that association ran almost entirely through fear of missing out. In other words, identifying strongly with online communities did not directly translate into compulsive phone use; rather, it amplified the anxiety that something important is happening elsewhere, that friends are sharing experiences from which one is absent, and that anxiety drove the compulsive checking, scrolling, and connectivity that define smartphone addiction. FoMO, first systematically characterized by Przybylski and colleagues in 2013 as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, thus emerged as the psychological engine converting social identity into behavior.

The moderation findings added a layer of nuance that the authors describe as the protective role of attachment. Peer attachment — the security, trust, and communication young adults experience in their close friendships — weakened the association between online social identity and both fear of missing out and smartphone addiction itself. When friendships are solid and satisfying in the offline world, the pull of the online group loses much of its urgency; being logged off no longer feels like being left out. Parent attachment operated at a different point in the model: it moderated the relationship between fear of missing out and smartphone addiction. Even among young adults with high FoMO, a secure bond with parents was associated with less compulsive smartphone use, as though a reliable family base reduced the need to regulate that anxiety through the device.

These findings fit within broader theoretical accounts of addictive behaviors, notably the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution model, which frames internet-use disorders as the product of interacting personal vulnerabilities, affective responses, and cognitive processes rather than any single cause. They also resonate with a long line of attachment research going back to John Bowlby, and with the proposition, articulated by psychologist P. J. Flores, that addiction can be understood as an attachment disorder. Meta-analytic evidence has already shown that insecure attachment is reliably linked to mobile phone addiction, and studies of adolescents have found that family cohesion and strong peer relationships reduce problematic use. The Italian study’s contribution is to specify where in the psychological chain those relationships exert their influence — a level of precision that matters for designing interventions.

The practical implications are potentially significant for both prevention and clinical practice. If online social identity and FoMO are risk factors, and attachment relationships are protective ones, then interventions need not target the smartphone directly. Programs that strengthen young people’s offline friendships and family communication could, according to this model, dampen the FoMO that fuels compulsive use, even for those deeply embedded in online communities. For clinicians, the results suggest that assessment of problematic smartphone use should include questions about attachment security and fear of missing out, and that therapeutic work on relational security — a staple of attachment-informed therapy — may have downstream benefits for digital behavior. The finding that peer and parent attachment protect at different points in the model also implies that family-based and peer-based interventions may be complementary rather than interchangeable.

The authors are careful about the study’s limits. The data are cross-sectional, so the mediation pathway — online social identity raising FoMO, which raises smartphone addiction — represents a theoretically motivated model fitted to a single snapshot rather than a demonstration of temporal causation. Longitudinal designs would be needed to confirm the direction of the arrows. The sample consists of Italian young adults, and cultural context may shape both online identity and family relationships, so generalization to other populations requires caution. All measures were self-reported, which introduces the possibility of bias, although validated scales mitigate this concern. The researchers also note that the study received no specific external funding and that the authors declared no conflicts of interest, with ethical approval obtained from the Ethics Committee for Scientific Research of LUMSA University of Rome in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Even with those caveats, the study offers one of the most complete pictures to date of how digital life, social psychology, and attachment theory intersect in the smartphone era. It reframes smartphone addiction not as a simple failure of self-control or an inevitable consequence of persuasive technology, but as the endpoint of a relational process: people who build their identity in online groups become anxious about absence from those groups, and that anxiety — unless buffered by secure bonds with friends and parents — finds its outlet in the device that keeps them perpetually connected. In a world where online and offline identities are increasingly intertwined, the research suggests that the strongest defense against the compulsive pull of the screen may be the quality of the relationships waiting on the other side of it. The data supporting the findings are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, and the full model awaits replication across cultures and age groups.

Subject of Research: Psychological determinants of smartphone addiction in young adults, focusing on online social identity, fear of missing out, and attachment relationships

Article Title: Smartphone addiction, FoMO, and online social identity: the protective role of peer and parent attachment

Article References: Topino, E., Rinallo, E., Gori, A., Scopelliti, M., & Cacioppo, M. (2026). Smartphone addiction, FoMO, and online social identity: the protective role of peer and parent attachment. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09798-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09798-9

Keywords: smartphone addiction, fear of missing out, FoMO, online social identity, attachment, peer attachment, parent attachment, young adults, moderated mediation, social media, Current Psychology, behavioral addiction