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When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health

Media exposure influences mental health symptomology in response to salient aversive events, like terrorist attacks, but little has been done to explore the impact of news coverage that varies more subtly in affective content. Here, we utilized an existing data set in which participants self-reporte...

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Autores principales: Wormwood, Jolie B., Devlin, Madeleine, Lin, Yu-Ru, Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Quigley, Karen S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084044/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30116210
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01333
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author Wormwood, Jolie B.
Devlin, Madeleine
Lin, Yu-Ru
Barrett, Lisa Feldman
Quigley, Karen S.
author_facet Wormwood, Jolie B.
Devlin, Madeleine
Lin, Yu-Ru
Barrett, Lisa Feldman
Quigley, Karen S.
author_sort Wormwood, Jolie B.
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description Media exposure influences mental health symptomology in response to salient aversive events, like terrorist attacks, but little has been done to explore the impact of news coverage that varies more subtly in affective content. Here, we utilized an existing data set in which participants self-reported physical symptoms, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms, and completed a potentiated startle task assessing their physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli at three time points (waves) over a 9-month period. Using a computational linguistics approach, we then calculated an average ratio of words with positive vs. negative affective connotations for only articles from news sources to which each participant self-reported being exposed over the prior 2 weeks at each wave of data collection. As hypothesized, individuals exposed to news coverage with more negative affective tone over the prior 2 weeks reported significantly greater physical and depressive symptoms, and had significantly greater physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli.
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spelling pubmed-60840442018-08-16 When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health Wormwood, Jolie B. Devlin, Madeleine Lin, Yu-Ru Barrett, Lisa Feldman Quigley, Karen S. Front Psychol Psychology Media exposure influences mental health symptomology in response to salient aversive events, like terrorist attacks, but little has been done to explore the impact of news coverage that varies more subtly in affective content. Here, we utilized an existing data set in which participants self-reported physical symptoms, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms, and completed a potentiated startle task assessing their physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli at three time points (waves) over a 9-month period. Using a computational linguistics approach, we then calculated an average ratio of words with positive vs. negative affective connotations for only articles from news sources to which each participant self-reported being exposed over the prior 2 weeks at each wave of data collection. As hypothesized, individuals exposed to news coverage with more negative affective tone over the prior 2 weeks reported significantly greater physical and depressive symptoms, and had significantly greater physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli. Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-08-02 /pmc/articles/PMC6084044/ /pubmed/30116210 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01333 Text en Copyright © 2018 Wormwood, Devlin, Lin, Barrett and Quigley. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Wormwood, Jolie B.
Devlin, Madeleine
Lin, Yu-Ru
Barrett, Lisa Feldman
Quigley, Karen S.
When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health
title When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health
title_full When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health
title_fullStr When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health
title_full_unstemmed When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health
title_short When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health
title_sort when words hurt: affective word use in daily news coverage impacts mental health
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084044/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30116210
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01333
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