JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Among the countries affected by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the US shows the highest number of confirmed cases (18.7 million, 23.5% of confirmed cases worldwide) and deaths (0.3 million, 18.9% of death worldwide) as of December 26, 2020. Early on in the pandemic, widespread social, financial, and mental insecurities led to extreme and irrational coping behaviors, such as panic buying. Yet, despite the consistent spread of COVID-19 transmission, the public have begun to violate public safety measures. From such observations, two key considerations arise. First, fear-eliciting health messages have a significant effect on eliciting motivation to take action in order to control the threat. However, repeated exposure to these messages over long periods results in desensitization to those stimuli.

Objective:

In this work, we examine the effect of fear-inducing news articles on people’s expression of anxiety on Twitter. Additionally, we investigate desensitization to the fear-inducing health news over time, despite the steadily rising COVID-19 death toll.

Methods:

This study examined the anxiety levels in news articles (n=1,465) and corresponding user tweets containing “COVID,” “COVID-19,” “pandemic,” and “coronavirus” over 11 months, then correlated that information with the death toll of COVID-19 in the United States.

Results:

Overall, tweets that shared links to anxious articles were more likely to be anxious. (OR 2.62, 95% CI 1.58-4.43, p < .001). These odds decreased (OR 0.41, 95% CI 0.2-0.83, p = .01) when the death toll reached the 3rd quartile and 4th quartile (OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.21-0.85, p = .01). Yet user tweet anxiety rose rapidly with articles when the death toll was low and then decreased in the 3rd quartile of deaths (OR .61, 95% CI 0.37-1.01, p=.058). As predicted, in addition to the increasing death toll being matched by a lower level of article anxiety, the extent to which article anxiety elicited user tweet anxiety decreased when the death count reached the 2nd quartile.

Conclusions:

Users’ tweets increased sharply in response to article anxiety early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, but as the casualty count climbed, news articles seemingly lost their ability to elicit anxiety among readers. This work investigated how individuals' emotional reactions to news of the COVID-19 pandemic manifest as the death toll increases. Findings suggest individuals became desensitized to the increased COVID-19 threat and their emotional responses were blunted over time.