Beyond Screen Time and Emotion Regulation: Social Trust as a Structural Pathway to Perceived Well-Being-A...

Youth well-being interventions in digital contexts overwhelmingly target individual emotional mechanisms, yet whether these actually outperform social-structural pathways when directly compared has remained untested. Using nationally representative Chinese youth data (N = 1967; 91.4% of young adults; China Family Panel Studies 2022) and a competing-models structural equation framework with 5000-iteration bootstrap resampling, we simultaneously tested three rival pathways linking screen time to well-being. Results decisively favored the social-structural model: the social trust pathway yielded the strongest indirect association (β = -0.030, p < 0.001), despite the small size, nearly twice the magnitude of family-based mechanisms (β = -0.011, p < 0.001), while the direct emotional pathway was non-significant (β = -0.004, p > 0.05). Critically, negative emotions did not function as an independent parallel pathway; they emerged sequentially downstream of trust erosion. If emotional distress is downstream of trust erosion rather than a parallel input, interventions targeting emotion regulation address a symptom while the structural mechanism goes unaddressed. These findings suggest youth well-being interventions in digital contexts may benefit from rebalancing attention from individual behavioral modification toward social-structural conditions.