Empathy and social media addiction: the mediating role of emotional contagion among university students

Abstract

Social media addiction (SMA) has emerged as a significant behavioral health concern among university students, yet the mechanisms linking empathic sensitivity to compulsive platform use remain unclear. This study examined whether emotional contagion mediates the relationship between empathy and SMA among 1,471 Egyptian university students. Participants completed the affective and cognitive measure of empathy (ACME), susceptibility to emotional contagion scale, and SMA scale. Structural equation modeling revealed that empathy negatively predicted SMA directly (β=-.527, p<.001). However, empathy operated through opposing emotional contagion pathways: it increased susceptibility to positive emotional contagion (PEC) (β=.564, p<.001), which paradoxically elevated addiction risk (β=.097, p<.001), while simultaneously decreasing susceptibility to negative emotional contagion (NEC) (β=-.322, p<.001), which further protected against addiction (β=.250, p<.001). These opposing indirect effects canceled each other, yielding a non-significant total mediation effect. Results indicate that empathy’s protective influence operates primarily through direct mechanisms rather than contagion-based transmission, with important implications for culturally tailored prevention strategies in collectivist educational contexts.