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With the rising concerns of compulsive use of social media, it is important to understand why users develop such unplanned and irrational behaviors. Leveraging the uses and gratification theory, the authors aim to explore the determinants of compulsive use of social media from the dual perspectives of individual needs (need to belong (NTB) and need for uniqueness) and peer-related factors (referent network size and perceived peer activeness). Due to the importance of self-construal in cognitive deliberation on peer influences, the moderating effects of self-construal were taken into consideration.

The authors empirically test their model by conducting an online survey with 459 WeChat users.

The results show that compulsive use of social media is predicated by both individual needs and influence from peers. Moreover, peer influence could be attenuated when individuals develop a high degree of independent self-construal.

The authors' study contributes to the research of compulsive behavior in the context of social media use by incorporating the dual effects of individual needs and social influence. The authors also offer managerial insights on eradicating the formation of compulsive behaviors.

The authors examine the dual effects of individual needs and peer influence in predicting compulsive use of social media and the moderating role of self-construal, which have been rarely investigated in this context.

This study addresses the impact of aesthetics and formality in Food Delivery Applications (FDAs) in evoking emotions, and how these influence the intention to reuse and compulsive usage, providing critical insights for designing responsible and effective marketing strategies.

A quantitative analysis of data collected from 1,029 FDA users was employed, using the PAD (Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance) theory to investigate how aesthetic design and formality affect emotions and consumer behaviour towards the applications.

The study reveals that aesthetic appeal and formality significantly impact emotions of dominance, arousal, and pleasure, which are decisive in users' decisions to continue using FDAs and in the manifestation of compulsive usage behaviours.

This study presents inherent limitations due to its cross-sectional design, which prevents offering a longitudinal perspective on the evolution of consumer behaviour regarding FDAs. The actual purchasing behaviour is not examined, but rather the suggested experiences. Future research could be enriched by considering cultural, social, and demographic factors, the influence of sustainability on the perception and use of FDAs, and the importance of specific sustainable practices. Adopting a longitudinal approach and utilising actual usage data would allow for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of consumer behaviour towards FDAs, taking into account both personal factors and functional attributes of FDAs along with their aesthetic appeal and emotional reactions.

The findings provide guidelines for FDA companies to optimise their interfaces to enhance user experience, foster loyalty, and prevent compulsive usage. They emphasise balancing aesthetics and functionality to induce more conscious and sustainable consumption behaviours.

This study highlights significant social implications stemming from the integration of aesthetic appeal and formality in Food Delivery Apps (FDAs) and their effect on consumer emotions, which in turn influences reuse intention and compulsive use. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer behaviours have shifted towards increased electronic transactions and hedonic consumption as responses to stress, anxiety, and boredom, leading to a reevaluation of life experiences through technological means. The research underlines the critical role of emotions, particularly pleasure, dominance, and arousal, in promoting the intention to reuse FDAs, which has far-reaching implications for consumer engagement, compulsive usage patterns, and the need for responsible, sustainable consumption practices. It suggests a new avenue for businesses and policymakers to consider emotional impacts and consumer satisfaction in the design and regulation of FDAs, aiming to mitigate potential adverse effects of compulsive usage and to encourage sustainable, responsible consumption behaviours.

The research offers a novel perspective by exploring how aesthetic and emotional dimensions affect consumer loyalty and compulsivity. These areas are still to be examined in depth in the marketing literature. The findings enhance the theoretical and practical understanding of FDA marketing, demonstrating how design can influence consumer well-being and the sustainability of purchasing behaviour.

1. Novel use of PAD theory to analyse FDA’s aesthetic appeal and formality on user emotions.

2. FDA’s aesthetic appeal significantly influences reuse intentions and compulsive usage.

3. Emotions of pleasure, dominance, and arousal are directly linked to FDA reuse intention.

4. Pleasure and reuse intention influence the compulsive use of FDAs.

Novel use of PAD theory to analyse FDA’s aesthetic appeal and formality on user emotions.

FDA’s aesthetic appeal significantly influences reuse intentions and compulsive usage.

Emotions of pleasure, dominance, and arousal are directly linked to FDA reuse intention.

Pleasure and reuse intention influence the compulsive use of FDAs.

Limited knowledge exists regarding the adverse effects of artificial intelligence adoption, including platforms like ChatGPT, on users’ mental well-being. The current research seeks to adopt the insight from the stressor-strain-outcome paradigm and a moderated mediation model to examine how technology anxiety moderates the direct and indirect relationships between compulsive use of ChatGPT, technostress, and life satisfaction.

Drawing data from a sample of 2,602 ChatGPT users in Vietnam, PROCESS macro was approached to test the moderated mediation model.

The findings indicate that compulsive use of ChatGPT exhibited a substantial and positive impact on technostress, while technostress was found to have a negative influence on life satisfaction. Moreover, although compulsive use of ChatGPT did not show a significant direct effect, it indirectly impacts life satisfaction via technostress. Remarkably, technology anxiety was found to significantly moderate both direct and indirect associations between compulsive use of ChatGPT, technostress, and life satisfaction.

Based on the findings of this research, some practical implications are provided.

The research offers a fresh perspective by applying the stressor-strain-outcome perspective to provide empirical evidence on the moderated mediation effects of technology anxiety and technostress on the relationship between compulsive use of ChatGPT and users’ life satisfaction. The research thus sheds new light on artificial intelligence adoption and its effects on users’ mental health.

Buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) services can put consumers into a debt trap by encouraging consumers to buy things they cannot afford, leading to a culture of materialism and consumerism. Therefore, this research aims to investigate how materialism can influence BNPL use and impulsive and compulsive buying. Additionally, the authors examine if BNPL use and impulsive buying mediate between materialism and compulsive buying.

Data from 556 participants were collected through a structured questionnaire via an online survey. Structural equation modeling (SEM) using SMART PLS 4 was employed to analyze the relationship between variables and to test the proposed hypotheses.

Materialism impact BNPL use and increases the inclination for impulse buying, precipitating compulsive buying behavior. However, BNPL use does not directly influence compulsive buying. The mediating relationship was identified, where BNPL use, and impulsive buying mediate the relationship between materialism and compulsive buying.

BNPL use alone does not inevitably lead to compulsive buying. The only way BNPL use could lead to compulsive buying is through impulsive buying. Therefore, BNPL service providers need to foster responsible buying habits due to the rise in impulsive buying, which, if not controlled, could lead to a debt trap resulting from compulsive buying.

This study contributes to the limited BNPL literature because there is speculation, but the scarcity of empirical evidence to substantiate, how materialism influences BNPL use and increases the inclination for impulse buying, precipitating compulsive buying behavior.

This study aims to identify the precedents of compulsively using a credit card, analyzing the influence of the following factors: power–prestige, anxiety, distrust and materialism.

Data collection was performed by the survey method, while the structural equation modeling technique was used for data analysis, adopting the confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis.

The impact that anxiety has on compulsive use of credit cards was confirmed. Furthermore, the influence of materialism present in an individual on the compulsive use of a credit card was also proven.

As a limitation, the power–prestige construction did not obtain satisfactory average variance extracted in the modeling. Other limitations can be pointed out; for instance, it was a sample composed of university students and with geographic restrictions.

This study highlights the importance of promoting public policies oriented toward the conscious use of credit cards. Interference in the approach of financial institutions aimed at attracting new clients in universities is also necessary.

This study aggregates information about the buying behavior of university students, how the precedents affect credit card use behavior and the harmful effects of compulsive use of credit cards.

The originality of this study is in offering a new approach to credit cards by analyzing their usage behavior, more specifically, the compulsive use of credit cards.

Compulsive usage of mobile applications may have a negative effect on people’s health and social interaction. Past studies have indicated that personality traits were related to compulsive usage of technologies, but most of them have explored the factors from the system and interface design perspectives, specifically. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Big Five personality traits, materialism, and external locus of control affect compulsive mobile application usage, and examines how compulsive usage impacts technostress.

The present study proposes a framework based on Big Five personality traits and related literature. The author collected a total of 546 valid responses to the online survey, and the author examined the 18 proposed hypotheses using SmartPLS software.

The results show that neuroticism, extraversion, materialism, and external locus of control have significant effects on compulsive usage of mobile social applications. In addition, agreeableness, materialism, and external locus of control significantly influence compulsive usage of mobile game applications. Compulsive usage (of both mobile social apps and mobile games), materialism, and external locus of control all have a positive, direct impact on technostress.

This study offers mobile app design companies and educational institutions a understanding of the social problems caused by the misuse of mobile devices, helping them to prevent the increase of the negative influences of such misuse.

The primary value of this paper lies in providing a better understanding of the influence of personality traits on the compulsive use of mobile apps and technostress.

This study aims to examine the mediating role of online compulsive buying in the association between excessive use of social networking sites (SNS) and financial well-being among Chinese young adults.

A sample of 539 SNS users and active online shoppers (M age = 20.32 years, SD age = 2.11) completed an online survey questionnaire measure of excessive use of SNS, online compulsive buying and financial well-being. Covariance based-structural equation modelling was used to assess the measurement model and the proposed mediation model.

Results indicated that excessive use of SNS was positively related to online compulsive buying behaviour and financial anxiety. Also, the results showed that online compulsive buying mediated the positive relationship between excessive use of SNS and financial anxiety.

Several implications were suggested and discussed to enhance the levels of financial well-being among youths by tackling their problematic behaviour such as excessive SNS usage and online compulsive buying.

The findings of this study contribute to the limited body of knowledge in the area of financial well-being and further improves our understanding of the effect of the excessive use of SNS on financial well-being and the mechanism behind it.

As an effort to identify the underlying determinants of compulsive buying, this study seeks to examine fashion orientation, a fashion‐related variable, as a direct antecedent of compulsive buying and as an indirect antecedent of compulsive buying through credit card use.

Using a convenient sampling method, women aged over 20 years living in the Seoul metropolitan area were selected as the sample. Out of 380 distributed, 267 useful questionnaires were returned. Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis were conducted using structural equation modeling.

The results of this study showed that fashion interest significantly influenced compulsive buying directly and also indirectly by influencing credit card use.

This study has significance in terms of being the first one to explore the relationship between fashion orientation variables and compulsive buying, offering a new perspective on compulsive buying.

The purpose of this study is to re-examine the characteristics of compulsive buying behaviour (CBB) based on a new improved screener. The study analyses young compulsive buyer attitudes, decision-making, product preferences, the impact of credit card use and post-purchase perspectives in relation to CBB severity.

The study takes a quantitative approach to the analysis of compulsive behaviour among young consumers, using data from a questionnaire survey and a large sample. A wide range of statistical procedures and structural equation modelling are used in the analysis.

The segmentation of compulsive buyers, on the basis of disorder severity, provides important insights into the asymmetrical between-group variation in anxiety levels, product preferences, feelings, attitudes and credit card impact and the within-group variability in daily compulsivity patterns and associated shopping behaviour.

Although the overall used sample size is large, the subdivision of compulsive consumers into mild and severe categories resulted in a relatively small group of severely compulsive buyers; hence, further research is recommended to corroborate the findings from this study. In addition, this research does not address the disorder’s temporal dimension; therefore, future longitudinal studies should be undertaken to analyse the progression and characteristics of the disorder over time.

The significant differences between mild compulsive buyers and severely compulsive buyers make a significant contribution to counselling practitioners because of the different levels of support that should be offered in relation to the severity of the condition.

The study compares non-compulsive behaviour with occasionally compulsive, mildly compulsive and severely compulsive consumers using an improved screening tool. It identifies critical criteria that distinguish between mild and severe forms of the disorder, which have hitherto been neglected, yet represent key diagnostic and predictive factors, which can inform both early intervention and our understanding of CBB and its complexity.

Compulsive social media use has the potential to reduce well-being. In this study, the authors propose that there are two main paths to compulsive social media consumption. One is behavioral and based on habit; the other is motivational and rooted in the fear of missing out. This study aims to test the antecedents of these two drivers as well as their consequences for the tendency to engage in compulsive social media consumption.

The authors applied a quantitative research design and collected data through a survey of 600 respondents from a representative sample. The authors used structural equation modeling to test their conceptual model and hypotheses. Gender and age were included as moderators to investigate the model’s boundary conditions.

The authors found support for all the suggested relationships in the conceptual model. The findings indicate two main manifestations of compulsive social media use – always being logged in (i.e. the frequency of social media consumption) and excessive use (the intensity of consumption) – that in turn spurred a reinforcer of compulsivity: disconnection anxiety. The findings also indicate two main paths to compulsive social media consumption. One path is behavioral, based on habit, and the other is motivational, based on fear of missing out. Moreover, the authors identified the key antecedents of both paths. Habit formation was observed to be a function of situational cues (technological nudges in the online sphere) and consumer engagement. Fear of missing out was shaped by both injunctive norms (a consumer norm to be online) and descriptive norms (social proof).

Although the antecedents of compulsive social media consumption suggested in this study have a strong and significant effect, the explained variance in the dependent variables being always logged in and excessive social media use indicates that there might be other drivers as well. These should be explored along with moderators other than gender and age to identify the potential boundary conditions of the model.

The main implications of the present work point to the “ease” with which typical or normal social media use may spiral out of control and become compulsive, with adverse implications for consumer health and well-being.

The behavioral and motivational paths to compulsive social media consumption have been less explored and have not yet been studied in conjunction, nor have their antecedents and consequences. Thus, this is a novel approach to understanding how social media use can potentially lead to reduced control and well-being.