The Effects of Passive and Active Screen Time on College Students' Emotions and Their Potential Mechanisms

Abstract

Screen use is ubiquitous in university life, yet debates continue about its impact on emotional well-being. This narrative review synthesizes evidence on the differential emotional effects of passive versus active screen time in college students. Drawing on epidemiological, experimental, and neurocognitive studies, we first define passive screen time as non-interactive, undirected content consumption and active screen time as goal-directed, interactive engagement. Passive use, especially late-night social media and short-video scrolling, is consistently associated with higher depressive and anxiety symptoms and co-occurs with sedentary behavior, rumination, attentional narrowing, and sleep disruption. In contrast, brief bouts of active use, including casual games, prosocial games, and exergames, can produce short-term mood repair, enhance positive affect, and support executive functioning, although excessive exposure to competence-impeding, violent, or highly arousing content may elicit frustration, anger, and physiological stress responses. Integrating emotion regulation theory, broaden-and-build theory, and recent neuroimaging findings, we propose a multi-level framework in which prefrontal–limbic circuitry, physiological arousal, and attentional dynamics jointly mediate these effects. Based on this framework, we argue that interventions for university students should move from a “reduce total screen time” approach toward optimizing configurations of use, discouraging passive scrolling while promoting adaptive, goal-aligned active use and off-screen restorative alternatives such as physical activity and exposure to green spaces. Future work should employ longitudinal, ecologically valid, and multimodal designs to clarify causal pathways and to identify individual and cultural moderators of screen-related emotional outcomes.