The impact of active live-stream participation on wellbeing: the mediating roles of social presence and connectedness and the moderating role of fear of missing out.

Résumé

BACKGROUND: Chat-based live streaming is a highly interactive digital environment in which viewers comment, react, and engage in real time. However, the psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions linking active participation to wellbeing remain unclear. Drawing on self-determination theory and social presence theory, this study examined whether social presence and social connectedness sequentially mediate the association between active live-stream participation and subjective wellbeing, and whether trait fear of missing out (FoMO) moderates the participation-based pathways.METHODS: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted with 467 adult viewers of chat-based live-streaming platforms in China. A regression-based moderated serial mediation model, corresponding to conceptual Model 85, was estimated in Python. The analyses controlled for 11 demographic and behavioral covariates and used heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors. Johnson-Neyman analyses were used to probe conditional associations across levels of FoMO.RESULTS: Active participation was positively associated with subjective wellbeing, both directly and indirectly through social presence and social connectedness, independently and in sequence. Trait FoMO was essentially unrelated to wellbeing at the bivariate level but robustly moderated the participation-based pathways. Johnson-Neyman analyses indicated that participation was positively associated with wellbeing for roughly three quarters of viewers, specifically those below a FoMO level of 3.40 on the 1-5 scale. This association weakened to non-significance at higher levels of FoMO and reversed only among a small minority of viewers, approximately 7%, at the highest levels of FoMO.CONCLUSION: Active participation in chat-based live streaming may function as a relational resource associated with subjective wellbeing, but its psychological value is conditional on dispositional anxiety. FoMO operated in this study as a boundary condition on the quality of participation rather than as a direct determinant of flourishing.