Belonging, Not FOMO, Emerges as the Strongest Predictor of Student Well-Being

University students who feel accepted and included by their peers report markedly higher levels of flourishing, while fear of missing out—despite its strong bivariate link with well-being—loses its predictive power once loneliness and belonging are taken into account. That is the central finding of a new cross-sectional study of 499 university students in Türkiye, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, which disentangles the overlapping relational experiences of fear of missing out (FoMO), loneliness, and belonging to reveal which of them matters most for positive psychosocial functioning.

The research, conducted by Osman Akay of Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University and Istanbul Medipol University, set out to answer a question that has grown increasingly urgent as student life migrates online: when FoMO, loneliness, and belonging all concern our relationships with others, which of them carries independent weight in how well young people thrive? Rather than treating well-being simply as the absence of distress, the study focused on flourishing—a broad self-appraisal encompassing meaning and purpose, engagement, supportive relationships, competence, optimism, self-regard, and social respect.

The theoretical scaffolding came from self-determination theory, which holds that well-being rests on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The belongingness hypothesis, which frames the formation of stable interpersonal bonds as a fundamental human motivation, reinforced the rationale for treating FoMO, loneliness, and belonging as distinct but related facets of a single relational domain. FoMO captures apprehension about missing personally valued experiences that others seem to be enjoying; loneliness reflects the perception that the quantity or quality of one’s relationships falls short; and belonging describes a more general sense of acceptance versus rejection. Crucially, none of these constructs automatically implies the others—a person can fear missing out without being lonely, or feel lonely despite frequent social contact.

Participants aged 18 to 30 (mean age 22.13; 76.4 percent female) completed an online survey between 1 and 5 June 2026, recruited through convenience and snowball sampling that began in a social work department and spread through students’ networks. The study distinguished Personal FoMO—concern about missed experiences tied to the private self—from Social FoMO, which concerns experiences enjoyed by others and relevant to one’s public standing. Belonging was likewise split into two facets: acceptance/inclusion and, reverse-scored, rejection/exclusion. Confirmatory factor analyses with ordinal estimation showed that the two-factor structures for both FoMO and belonging fit substantially better than single-factor alternatives, although overall fit indices remained mixed, and the authors were careful not to claim definitive measurement confirmation.

At the simplest level of analysis, every hypothesis-relevant association pointed in the expected direction. Both FoMO facets and loneliness correlated negatively with flourishing, while acceptance/inclusion and lower perceived rejection correlated positively, all with p values below 0.001. Loneliness correlated with flourishing at r = −0.466, and acceptance/inclusion at r = 0.665—the strongest zero-order association in the study. Social FoMO was more strongly tied than Personal FoMO to both belonging facets, hinting that anxiety about one’s social image may erode felt acceptance more than anxiety about private missed opportunities does.

The heart of the study was a four-block hierarchical regression that entered age and gender first, then the two FoMO facets, then loneliness, and finally the two belonging facets. Each block added significant incremental explained variance, and the final seven-predictor model accounted for 51.2 percent of the variance in flourishing. Because the Breusch–Pagan test flagged heteroskedasticity, all inference relied on HC3 heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors. In the fully adjusted model, acceptance/inclusion emerged as the dominant positive predictor (β = 0.526, p < 0.001), loneliness retained a small negative coefficient (β = −0.136, p = 0.016), and reverse-scored rejection/exclusion showed a smaller positive association (β = 0.138, p = 0.023). Strikingly, neither FoMO facet kept a significant unique coefficient once loneliness and belonging were in the model.

A relative-importance decomposition quantified this hierarchy: acceptance/inclusion alone accounted for 56.9 percent of the model’s explained variance, loneliness for 15.6 percent, and rejection/exclusion for 15.5 percent, while the two FoMO facets together contributed just over 11 percent and demographics less than 1 percent. Exploratory latent structural models reinforced the pattern, estimating that the full model explained 65.1 percent of the variance in latent flourishing, with Social FoMO’s total indirect association with flourishing (−0.269) flowing mainly through reduced acceptance/inclusion.

The authors anticipated a methodological trap: the Flourishing Scale itself contains explicitly relational items about supportive relationships, contributing to others’ happiness, and being respected by others. A strong belonging–flourishing link could therefore partly reflect item-content overlap rather than substantive association. To address this, the regression was rerun with the three relational items removed. Acceptance/inclusion (β = 0.469) and loneliness (β = −0.168) remained significant, but the rejection/exclusion coefficient did not—suggesting that the acceptance and loneliness findings are not merely artifacts of shared wording, while the rejection/exclusion association is less robust. A parallel sensitivity analysis in prior literature, in which perceived social support remained associated with well-being after 14 relationship items were stripped from an outcome scale, lends convergent support to this approach.

Further robustness checks—retaining all 501 non-straightlining records, restricting the sample to ages 18–29, and screening influential observations by Cook’s distance—left the core loneliness and belonging results intact. One nuance emerged: Personal FoMO turned into a small significant negative coefficient only when the most influential cases were excluded, marking it as sensitive to analytic decisions rather than a stable unique predictor. The authors also noted that the study was not preregistered and that the latent indirect models describe model-implied covariance patterns, not causal mediation.

The limitations are candidly acknowledged. A cross-sectional, self-report design cannot establish temporal order or causation; convenience and snowball recruitment through online networks may have favored digitally engaged students; the female-predominant sample limits generalizability to male students; and no CAPTCHA or unique identifiers could fully rule out repeated participation. Longitudinal evidence from other research groups adds further caution: some panel studies find within-person paths running from loneliness to later FoMO rather than the reverse, and a 12-month two-wave study found baseline loneliness predicting later FoMO among college students. The consistent message is that FoMO should not be assumed to precede loneliness. What the present study does establish is that, among Turkish university students, the felt experience of being accepted and included stands out as the strongest concurrent correlate of flourishing—outweighing the digital-age anxiety of missing out—and that loneliness carries its own independent weight. The authors point to no specific intervention target, but the findings suggest that future longitudinal and experimental work should examine whether strengthening students’ sense of inclusion, rather than merely dampening FoMO, offers the more promising route to helping them thrive.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional associations of FoMO, loneliness, and belonging with flourishing in university students

Article Title: Flourishing in university students: cross-sectional associations with personal and social FoMO, loneliness, and belonging

Article References: Akay, O. (2026). Flourishing in university students: cross-sectional associations with personal and social FoMO, loneliness, and belonging. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 20, Article 1914187. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1914187

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1914187

Keywords: fear of missing out, FoMO, flourishing, loneliness, belonging, university students, well-being, self-determination theory, social media, hierarchical regression, cross-sectional study, Türkiye