Association between desire thinking and problematic social media use among a sample of Lebanese adults: The indirect effect of suppression and impulsivity

BACKGROUND: Desire thinking, impulsivity and suppression are psychological variables that are intricately related to behavioral addictions. Bearing in mind the scarcity of data on desire thinking, impulsivity, thought suppression and pathological social media use in developing countries such as Lebanon, with the existing literature suggesting a heightened mental health burden associated with this problematic social media use, it becomes all the more important to elucidate their relationship. Our study aims at investigating the association between desire thinking and problematic social media use specifically, and to further test the effect of impulsivity and thought suppression in mediating the relation between the two distinct facets of desire thinking and problematic social media use. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was carried out between November 2021 and March 2022 using a sample of 414 community-dwelling participants aged above 18 years from all Lebanese districts. The data was collected through an online questionnaire including a section about sociodemographic information, the Desire Thinking Questionnaire (DTQ), Impulsive Behavior Scale (S-UPPS-P), White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI) and Social Media Disorder Short Form (SMD). The tests used in the bivariate analysis to assess correlates of SMD were the Student t test to compare two means and the Pearson test to correlate two continuous scores. The PROCESS SPSS Macro version 3.4, model four was used to conduct the mediation analysis. RESULTS: Desire thinking was shown to correlate with increased social media use. Moreover, we found that suppression and lack of premeditation mediated the association between verbal perseveration and social media use disorder whereas suppression and urgency mediated the association between imaginal prefiguration and social media use disorder. CONCLUSION: This study provides new insight on a topic of increasing public health concern. Although understudied to date, suppression and impulsivity differentially mediate the influence of both facets of desire thinking on problematic social media use disorder. The current findings point to the highly pervasive issue of social media use disorder and the need to investigate underlying psychological factors that aggravate it to better profile and support individuals struggling with it.