Abstract:  Fear of missing out (FoMO) refers to the pervasive apprehension resulting from worries that others might be experiencing fantastic stories or positive events from which one is absent. FoMO is determined by various factors such as personality traits, psychological needs, social media usage and age. FoMO would exert great impacts on social media usage and psychosocial adaptation. Meanwhile, FoMO can act as a mediator through which some factors influence social media usage and psychological adaption. The key issues of future studies on FoMO are the discrimination of contiguous concept, improvement of measurement and research method, as well as investigation of influencing factors and aftereffects.

Key words: fear of missing out (FoMO), social media, self-regulation, Self-determination theory