Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Feb 1, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 31, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 4, 2022
The mental health impact of daily news exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic: An ecological momentary assessment study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Consumption of distressing news media, which increased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, has demonstrable negative effects on mental health.
Objective:
The current study examines the proximal impact of daily exposure to news about COVID-19 on mental health in the first year of the pandemic.
Methods:
A sample of 546 college students completed daily ecological momentary assessments for 8 weeks measuring exposure to news about COVID-19, worry and optimism specifically related to COVID-19, hopelessness, and general worry.
Results:
Participants completed >80,000 surveys. Multilevel mediation models indicated that greater daily exposure to news about COVID-19 was associated with higher same-day and next-day worry about the pandemic. Elevations in worry specifically about COVID-19 were in turn associated with greater next-day hopelessness and general worry. Optimism about COVID-19 mediated the relationship between daily exposure to COVID-19 news and next-day general worry but was not related to hopelessness.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrates the mental health impact of daily exposure to COVID-19 news and highlights how worry about the pandemic contributes over time to hopelessness and general worry.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.