I.

Background of study:
The first paper on the Fear of Missing Out—FOMO, the ailment of our cultural
moment—was written back in the year 2000 by a marketing strategist named
Dan Herman, but the concept took many years to gestate. Now, as the
availability of the internet have grown rapidly in the last decade, FOMO is
suddenly ubiquitous.

Despite the variety of research topics and business categories being explored,
the article “ The fear of missing our (FOMO) by Dan Herman in 2010 can be
seen as an extreme new development for FOMO phenomenon which point out a
growing awareness of the virtually endless selection of options for one to
choose.The futile attempt to exhaust all available options lead us to not realizing
any option at all, and to missing all options altogether.

Then until 2013 with the study about “ Motivational, emotional, and behavioral
correlates of fear of missing out” Przybylski was the first to present an
operationalized and empirically-based account of the FoMO phenomenon,
together with a self-report questionnaire – the FoMO scale (FoMOs), published
in a study that also gathered empirical evidence of the concept’s construct
validity and psychological correlates (Przybylski et al., 2013). According to
these authors, the scale is meant to reflect the fears and worries people may
have in relation to being out of touch with experiences across their extended
social environment.

Even though there are many studies about FOMO and are most important for
the development of this thesis but most of papers only focused on FOMO
consequences such as: changing in life satisfaction, purchasing behaviour,
psychological outcome, etc. However, there are only a few studies about the
antecedents of FOMO; in which these elements are the main cause of this
phenomenon as well as key to solve this issue. Especially, there is no paper
researching this phenomenon in Viet Nam. Therefore, conducting the study
about the FOMO phenomenon in the Vietnamese context is critical.

II.Statement of problem
The fear of missing out:
As we mentioned many young people now are suffering FOMO without any
awareness which is defined as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be
having rewarding experiences from which one is absent” (Przybylski et al.,
2013).
One of the typical expressions of FOMO is that young people spend most of
their time on social networks, especially Facebook - with its 1.74 billion active
users worldwide (Statista, 2016) is the most popular platform, because young
people claim that Facebook is their personal highlight reel, where they could
pose their best shining moments and compare themselves with others highlight
reel; as a result, they will be so obsessed with others’ better, known as a sign of
“FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out” (Arzeno, 2018).
According to a study of Statista in 2017, people spend average 135 minutes per
day on social media and Facebook is is the most commonly used application.
From these issues, it is worth pointing out that the ease of sharing information
on Facebook has created favorable conditions for the FOMO phenomenon
increasing. More specifically, the shared content, whatever it is for the purpose
of attracting others' attention in intentionally or unintentionally way, creates the
empathy and curiosity from others; therefore, the users can easily consume the
content as well as pay more attention to others. As a consequence, the content
has accidentally become the basis for users to compare themselves to others,
and make them scared when they feel someone is better than themselves.

According to a survey conducted by a South Africa pharmaceutical organization

which takes a sample of 3000 people from 15 to 55 years old, over 62% of 3000
respondents have a constant feeling of missing out something interesting or
popular in society. People who are suffering from FOMO keep putting
themselves under stress most of the time. Even when they have an illness, they
still try not to miss what is happening or whether there are any hot issues in
society. A study shows that 70% of all mature people in developed countries
are suffering FOMO to different level. Based on evidence, we cannot reject that
FOMO syndrome occurs quite commonly. It is significant to research this
syndrome further, especially towards young people.
Another expression of FOMO is that fear of missing out proved to be an
important predictor of emotional distress (Gil, Del Valle, Oberst, & Chamarro,
2015). Sometime, everyone can relate to being at dinner with family or friends
but being distracted because the phone is vibrating in the pocket with texts and
phone calls, or maybe having a moment where you sit in a complete and terribly
uncomfortable silence because everyone around the table has head down,
texting. So FOMO keep us from connecting with people but it does so much
more than that, which lead us to the feeling of loneliness, feelings of inferiority,
reduced self-esteem. Another cases is that you have a moment hanging out with
friends but you remember that you have a deadline fast approaching which lead
you to have a huge pit of stress in your stomach and after that you can’t enjoy
anything and have a terrible thought of failure. From that point on, you’re
distracted from your friends, you can’t enjoy where you are and underachieving
the goals make you increased levels of negativity and depression. It is not
surprising that the use of anti-depressants has risen sharply in recent years due
to FOMO.
It might be thought that FOMO creates more negative consequences than
benefits to one’s life.
In fact, it’s not possible to get over this essential human fear because FOMO is
our natural alarm but if you can understand the source of our fear of missing out
so that we can use it to make a better decision and do what we happy. We
address the study “ Exploring the Antecedents and Consumer Behavioral
Consequences of Feeling of MIssing Out (Hayran, Anik & Gürhan-Canli,
2016) as the empirical part of the source for the overall understanding of
FOMO. The antecedents of FOMO include Self-Relevance (SR), Perceived
Favorability (PF), Popularity(P), Perceived Exclusivity (PE), and Perceived
Sociability.

II.Objectives of the study:

This paper is aiming to reach scientific and practical purpose through answering
the following research questions:
In term of scientific purpose:
● What are the antecedents of FOMO phenomenon?
● Is there any negative/positive relationship between FOMO and mental
health?
● Is there any negative/positive relationship between mental health and
emotional expression and usage frequency?
In term of practical purpose:
● What is the current situation of FOMO among UEH students?
● How could FOMO affect the UEH students' emotional expression on
Facebook through mental health?
● How could FOMO affect the UEH students' usage frequency on
Facebook through mental health?
This introduction has acknowledge both the background and the motivation for
the topic selection as well as to state the existing research gap and how to fill it.
Next, the theoretical framework will discuss the assumptions and theories that
allow a complete understanding of the Fear of Missing Out. As such, this will
further enable an identification of the limits and the critical points of the topic,
as it has so far been developed. The following chapter will then present in detail
the research question for this thesis, including all the hypotheses that depart
from it as well an illustration of the research model.

III.Theoretical Framework:
1. Using social media intensity:
Daven (2014) pointed out that the general mood and overall life satisfaction of
people suffering FoMO are considered low. According to Wallace (2014),
FoMO can be one of the main reasons for students to check social media a
hundred times, even when it’s day or night. Przybylski et al. (2013) discovers
that FoMO has been negatively associated with a psychological well-being.The
frequent use of Facebook tends to reduce the feeling of well-being among
teenagers rather than make them feel more connected and less socially anxious.
Kuss & Griffiths (2017) argue that FoMO can cause addiction to social media
which is derived from feeling impulsive many times when being worried not to
connect to networking platforms. The use of social media is a complex subject
related not only to how and why people use it but also to the feelings they
associate with it in their relation to others (Hetz, Dawson, & Cullen, 2015). It is
also worth mentioning here that people all over the world spend increasingly
greater amounts of time ( average more than two hours per day) on social media
every year. (We Are Social, 2017).
2. Emotional Expression:
According to Keltner & Kring, 1998; Niedenthal & Brauer, 2011; van Kleef,
2009, emotional expressions structure social interactions by serving as
incentives for others’ actions, by rewarding specific patterns of behavior in
perceivers. Early studies on this notion focused on how parents use warm smiles
and touches to increase the likelihood of certain behaviors in their children (e.g.,
Tronick, 1989) and the incentive value of laughter, and how it triggers
cooperative interactions between friends (Owren & Bachorowski, 2001). This
theory perfectly describes the link between Facebook and emotional expressions
both online and in real life. People tend to do what the others admire and
appraise on Facebook. When they see somebody is appraised of what she did,
they tend to do exactly the same with hope of receiving recognition like that girl
had already done. The ways Facebook users express their feelings such as
admire, happy, hate, angry, empathy…. for someone else are incentives making
the others want to do something to gain that kind of attention from society.
Actions borned from these incentives can be visual or realistic. This could result
in both positive and negative sides. The second idea is that emotional
expressions rapidly provide important information relevant to perceivers, useful
in guiding subsequent behavior. For example, emotional expressions can signal
trait-like tendencies of individuals. Individuals looking angry are perceived as
dominant (Knutson, 1996) and those showing embarrassment are seen as being
of upstanding character (Feinberg et al.,2012). How people express emotions
through Facebook is one of the means to portrait their unique personalities then
show them to the world. Consequently, people try to make up perfect images in
the others’ eyes by expressing feelings, thoughts which are not their real
experiences on social media. In other words, people fake their emotions on
Facebook in order to get some attention. Once they get things they want, people
usually keep on doing to gain more and more. In these cases, it is pointed out
that people are fear of being missed opportunities to show off themselves and to
be recognized by the others.
3. The Antecedents of FOMO:
In fact, we share more and more information about our day - to - day activities
on social media, especially Facebook, FOMO is becoming a common sensation
felt among users; a larger factor in emotional expression of UEH’s students and
frequency of their use.

To see just what cause FOMO, we base on three factors which might influence
FOMO. They are Self- Relevance (SR), Perceived Favorability (PF), Popularity
which have been investigated as antecedents of FOMO by Hayan at al. (2016)

To understand more about the structure of these studies, we will browse a

previous study and ascertain the relationship between them and FOMO by
manipulating to make SR, PF, P important and FOMO was evaluated through
the scale adapted from Przybylski et al. (2013), firstly, participants were
requested to imagine that they found information about dining in a newly
opened restaurant and at that time checking Facebook for alternative events they
could attend instead. As a result, popularity didn’t have any influence on FoMo
or on revisit intentions. On the contrary, the study indicated that self- relevance
and favorability both with high level had a clearly positive effect on the Fear of
Missing out and negative influence on revisit intentions.
Especially, when favorability has low level, it doesn’t have any impact of
self-relevance on revisit intentions, (in this case, FOMO defined as a mediating
role in the PF X SR interaction on revisit intention).
The other four studies included different samples: one from Facebook users, one
from undergraduate university students, one from an office environment and the
last one from participants in a museum event. They are considered the presence
of alternative events and the manipulation of antecedents. These studies all gave
the result with the same conclusion that SR and PF, but not P, could be
pre-conditions of FoMo.
Another research also revealed that two other antecedents of FOMO are
Perceived Exclusivity and Perceived Popularity which were found out by .
However, both researchers focus on studying the influence of FOMO on
purchase behaviour. In our research, we will determine, denote the impact of
five antecedents, which are studied by previous researchers, on Fear of Missing
Out and the relationship between FOMO and emotional expression of UEH’s
students and their frequency of using Facebook.

IV.Hypotheses:
This research aims to measure the antecedents of FOMO, more specifically,
whether there is any relationship between Self-Relevance, Perceived
Favorability, Popularity, Perceived Exclusivity, Perceived Sociability and this
syndrome.
Moreover, exploring the impacts of FOMO on how UEH’s students express
their emotion and the frequency of their use on Facebook are also the goal of
this study, people look for opportunities that they will not miss any news in
society and want to get more attention from community through social network,
specifically- Facebook.
Though FOMO can bring negative psychological and behavioural outcomes for
people, it is becoming popular in society. It is certainly reasonable to assume
that everyone will get FOMO syndrome in the future, so that having a basic
knowledge about FOMO could prevent further negative impacts of FOMO

Self-Relevance
Self-Relevance “is perceived as psychologically significant or important to
one’s self-esteem” ( VandenBos,2007)
When there is a hot news in social media, concretely on Facebook, people want
to turn themselves becoming the one, who update the news fastest, comparing to
other users to express their ego. That is to say, Self-Relevance is clearly
expressed by the amount of news or trends that people update daily compared to
others, so they can ensure that in social network, they are not inferior to anyone
but know more about it than anyone else.
For this reason, when encountered with the lack of updating news, Facebook’s
users may experience unease and apprehension that not knowing the trend will
lead to a missed opportunities to express their ego and worth to others.
H1: Higher Self Relevance towards a trend or news leads to higher FOMO

Perceived Favorability
Favorability shows the general response, which can be positive, negative or
neutral towards a phenomenon (person,item,etc.) is happening on Facebook. In
fact, when a trend appears, people get the tendency to catch up and respond
their attitude towards that trend.They want to be the one, who capture or possess
favorable subject on Facebook faster than other users.
Otherwise, one are not reflecting toward a favorable phenomenon happening on
Facebook, they will feel uncomfortable and raise a fear of missing out the
opportunity to realize favorable trends.
H2: Higher Perceived Favorability toward a subject leads to higher FOMO

Popularity
Popularity is a social phenomenon according to which an item or an individual
is well-liked, enjoyed or supported by many people ( Cambridge dictionary )
On Facebook, every account is the same, people have the tendency to compare
themselves to others, to actually get more “like” than other users. In particular,
people see the Popularity here when they get a lot of attention from other users
through “like”, “comment” or “share” buttons. Thanks to social media, their
popularity is spread, hence, they keep posting stunning moments on Facebook
to further their fame
In general, people think that the popularity means social acceptance. Thus, if a
person finds that he or she is not popular on social media, it can raise a fear
inside them that they are missing the chance to be well-known, to fit in the
society.
H3: Higher Popularity of a user account on Facebook leads to higher FOMO

Perceived Exclusivity
A subject ( item, video,etc.) is considered exclusive when:
- The amount of an item is limited and not many people own it
- A sensitive video or news is released on Facebook in a short time and will
be deleted in the future
Exclusivity refers to the right to have or do something that is restricted to a
limited amount of people. That is to say, a person realizes that a subject is
exclusive, he or she promptly wants to update or own it before it's too late.
Their urgent actions can be considered as an expression of FOMO syndrome,
more specifically, they are afraid of missing the opportunity to possess
something unique and will no longer exist in the future.
H4: Higher Perceived Exclusivity leads to higher FOMO

Perceived Sociability
In this perspective, social media, specifically Facebook, is a virtual network,
which allows one to connect with others.
The amount of interactions on Facebook is a factor which determines their value
on social networks. The higher level of interaction is, the stronger relationships
with other users they have and their networking is expanded.
When one finds that his or her level of interaction on Facebook is low, they
might perceive that they miss an opportunity to engage in relationships with
other user accounts and to be isolated on social network.
H5: Higher Perceived Sociability leads to higher FOMO

FOMO on Emotional Expression

The higher the level of FOMO experienced, the greater the negative effects on
how people express their emotion, which affects their real life
There are many ways to express the sentiment when people experienced
FOMO, 2 typical types are:
- One tends to have self-contained lifestyle, they do not show their feelings
to the opposite person, nor integrate with society but only want to share
these emotions on virtual social networks. Thus, they are isolating
themselves from the real society.
- Because people are experiencing FOMO, their emotions have also
become erratic, particularly they always feel worry about something or
get angry suddenly,...which affect their lives
H6: FOMO has a negative impact on Emotional Expression

FOMO on The Frequency of using Facebook

The higher level of FOMO experienced, the higher the frequency people using
Facebook. That is to say, when one experiences FOMO syndrome, he or she
afraids of missing a trend or news is prevailing on Facebook, so they keep
spending time on surfing Facebook even if there is nothing new. People would
rather surfing Facebook as an indispensable habit, than missing the opportunity
to update the latest trend which may make them feel isolated comparing to
others. Moreover, people think that surfing Facebook frequently also determines
their value on social networks, asserts their existence through virtual social
networks and engages in relationships with other users.
H7: FOMO leads to the higher the Frequency of using Facebook

To sum up, these hypotheses can be assumed:

H1:Higher Self Relevance towards a trend or news leads to higher FOMO
H2:Higher Perceived Favorability toward a subject leads to higher FOMO
H3:Higher Popularity of a user account on Facebook leads to higher FOMO
H4:Higher Perceived Exclusivity toward a subject leads to higher FOMO
H5:Higher Perceived Sociability of a user account on Facebook leads to higher
FOMO
H6:FOMO has a negative impact on Emotional Expression
H7:FOMO leads to higher the Frequency of using Facebook

V.Methodology:
1. Type of Study ( exploratory, descriptive or causal )
2. Definition of Target Population and Sample size
3. Sample Design and Data Collection Methods (qualitative, observation,
survey or experimental )
4. Specific Research Instruments ( depth-interview, focus group, data
collection form, scales )
5. Potential Managerial Benefits of the Proposed Study
6. Proposed cost for the Total Project
7. Profile of the Research Company Capabilities
8. Optional Dummy Tables of the Projected Results

VI.Plan of Work

Time Frame Task

20/9/2019 - 15/11/2019 ( Already)
22/12/2019 - 29/12/2019 (In process)
30/12/2019 - 11/1/2020
12/1/2020 - 14/1/2020
15/1/2020 - 29/1/2020
29/1/2020 - 8/2/2020
Topic confirmation & Research
proposal
Research, reading and 1st draft for
Introduction, Theoretical framework
and Hypothesis writing
2nd Draft after teacher review
3rd draft for Methodology and
questionnaire design and teacher
review
Conduct a survey
Data analysis and initial draft of result
9/2/2020 - 15/2/2020 2nd draft of result
16/2/2020 - 28/2/2020 Writing of the result and conclusion