Open Access

ARTICLE

The Relationship between TikTok (Douyin) Addiction and Social and Emotional Learning: Evidence from a Survey of Chinese Vocational College Students

Jian-Hong Ye^1,2,#, Yongjian Wang^1,#, Weiguaju Nong^3,*, Jhen-Ni Ye⁴, Yuting Cui⁵

1 Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
2 National Institute of Vocational Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
3 School of Education, Guangxi University of Foreign Languages, Nanning, 530222, China
4 Graduate Institute of Technological & Vocational Education, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei City, 106344, Taiwan
5 Faculty of Educational Administration, Beijing Institute of Education, Beijing, 100120, China

* Corresponding Authors: Weiguaju Nong. Email: ,
# These two authors contributed equally to this work

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Causes, Consequences and Interventions for Emerging Social Media Addiction)

International Journal of Mental Health Promotion 2025, 27(7), 995-1012. https://doi.org/10.32604/ijmhp.2025.066326

Received 05 April 2025; Accepted 27 June 2025; Issue published 31 July 2025

Abstract

Objectives: The addiction of the student population to short-form video platforms such as TikTok (Douyin) is becoming increasingly apparent and is rapidly expanding. This emerging addiction is also believed to have negative impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional well-being. Consequently, video addiction has become an important public health issue on campuses around the world. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between two types of TikTok addiction (video and live streaming) and social and emotional learning (SEL), including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Methods: Previous research has indicated that some students at vocational colleges become addicted to short-form videos. Accordingly, this study employed a snowball sampling method to survey students at vocational institutions across China. A total of 563 valid responses were obtained, yielding an effective response rate of 84.66%. The mean age of participants was 20.20 years old (SD = 1.36). Data were validated with structural equation modeling. Results: Results showed that both video content addiction and live-streaming content addiction negatively correlated with all five dimensions of SEL. This also represents that all 10 hypotheses are valid and significant at p < 0.001. The effect sizes ranged from 0.48 to 0.54, which represents larger effect sizes. Notably, TikTok addiction showed the strongest explanatory power for self-awareness. This indicates that higher levels of addiction to either video or live-streaming content are associated with poorer performance across all facets of social and emotional learning, including self-awareness, emotion regulation, interpersonal relationships, sense of responsibility, and empathy. Conclusion: This study found that TikTok addicts entered a state of ego depletion due to impaired self-regulation. This depletion then caused their subsequent self-control efforts during learning to fail. Our results also support the ego depletion theory, which posits that engaging in self-regulatory behaviors consumes limited self-control resources and can trigger a range of complex cognitive, emotional, and behavioral problems. This result also draws attention to the negative consequences of excessive use of short videos for social awareness and emotional performance.

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Keywords

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