The Relationship Between Difficulty in Emotion Regulation and Celebrity Worship: the Mediating Role of Instagram Addiction

The significant increase in fascination with celebrities and social media platform like Instagram in recent years have led to questions about the characteristics and emotional expression patterns of  followers and users.  The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the relationship between the difficulty in emotion regulation and celebrity worship with the mediating role of Instagram addiction. All students enrolled at public universities in Tehran during the academic year of 1402 made up the statistical population of the study. Of these, 462 men and women were chosen via student social networks. The Celebrity Attitude scale (McCutcheon et al., 2002), the brief version of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale (Bjureberg et al., 2016), and the Instagram Addiction scale (Andreassen et al., 2012) were used to collect data and were examined using the structural equation modeling method. The results demonstrated that the celebrity worship has a direct and significant association with the difficulty in emotion regulation, with the Instagram addiction serving as the mediator of this relationship. (β= 0/048, p< 0/05). The research findings suggest a link between emotion regulation problems and an increased fascination with celebrities. Moreover, the use of platforms like Instagram can further facilitate this connection by providing more opportunities to engage with celebrities and develop parasocial relationships.