The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds
It’s a common feeling. Tons of people report opening TikTok for “just a few minutes” only to look up and see an hour has passed. For some users, though, that cycle runs deeper than a bad habit, tied to patterns researchers associate with early experiences of love and rejection. A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that people who harbor an intense fear of being abandoned or rejected are significantly more likely to develop a problematic relationship with short-form video apps, with two psychological traits appearing to play a key role: a fragmented ability to focus and a difficulty recognizing one’s own feelings.
At the center of the research is a concept called attachment anxiety, often linked to early childhood bonding. People who grow up with inconsistent or emotionally unreliable caregivers often internalize a persistent fear of being unloved or left behind. That fear doesn’t disappear in adulthood. It quietly shapes how people manage stress, sustain attention, and cope with discomfort, and, according to this study, how compulsively they scroll.
Short-form video platforms are designed to keep users engaged for long stretches. Algorithm-driven clips deliver rapid bursts of stimulation that keep the brain’s reward system humming. For people already struggling with anxiety and poor emotional regulation, that feedback loop can be especially difficult to break. Prior research has placed the rate of problematic short-video use among Chinese university students as high as 27 percent, and by 2023, short-video users in China had surpassed one billion.
Source: StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.com/tiktok-addiction-fear-of-rejection/