Beyond Screen Time and Emotion Regulation: Social Trust as a Structural Pathway to Perceived Well-Being—A Competing-Models Analysis Among Chinese Youth

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 0.05). 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.