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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0046

Modeling the "amusement park effect" of social media in Generation Z: a latent variable approach

MODELING THE “AMUSEMENT PARK EFFECT” OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN GENERATION Z: A LATENT VARIABLE APPROACH

In a preliminary sample of thirty participants, social media addiction, fear of missing out, and social media fatigue were moderately to strongly correlated with one another and with cognitive failures, suggesting that they could be grouped under a single higher-order "amusement park effect" construct.

The study aims to model the "amusement park effect," characterized by high arousal, emotional fluctuations, compulsive use, and subsequent cognitive fatigue, as a higher-order latent construct in Generation Z. The study uses a cross-sectional self-report survey design; the sample comprises n = 30 participants aged 18 to 25 years (mean 21.5, standard deviation 2.61), of whom 83.3% are women. The measures used are the FoMO Scale (9 items), the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (6 items), Social Media Fatigue (14/15 items), Social Comparison Orientation (10 items), the WHO-5 Well-Being Index (5 items), and the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (25 items). The planned analysis is second-order structural equation modeling (second-order SEM, target n ≥ 200); the analyses of n = 30 presented in the poster are descriptive and exploratory only. Correlations between social media addiction and FoMO were r = 0.511 (p < 0.01), social media fatigue r = 0.416 (p < 0.05), and cognitive failures r = 0.627; correlations between FoMO and social media fatigue were r = 0.468 and cognitive failures r = 0.567 (p < 0.01); the correlation between social media fatigue and cognitive failures was r = 0.331. Associations with the WHO-5 were negative: social media addiction r = -0.308, FoMO r = -0.388 (p < 0.05), cognitive failures r = -0.219, and social media fatigue r = 0.040. Daily use was less than 1 hour for 10% of participants, 1 to 2 hours for 20%, 2 to 4 hours for 36.7%, 4 to 6 hours for 26.7%, and more than 6 hours for 6.7%; 70% used social media for at least 2 hours a day. The poster also reports that approximately three-quarters of participants scored below the clinical cutoff for well-being. The authors recommend evaluating FoMO, social media addiction, and social media fatigue—which are addressed separately in the literature—within a unified paradigm and developing digital detox programs, clinical screening, and psychological support systems tailored to Generation Z.

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