(PS2-32) Positive News Headlines and Less Information-seeking Reduce Daily Anxiety During a Global Pandemic

Abstract Text: Individuals with higher levels of anxiety symptoms demonstrated an increase in COVID-19-related information-seeking behavior during a global pandemic (Charpentier et al., 2022). However, it remains unclear whether daily anxiety symptoms relate to the emotionality of information sources, along with individual information-seeking behaviors. Our study investigates the effects of news headline sentiment and information-seeking behaviors on daily anxiety symptoms and tests whether this association is moderated by two emotion regulation strategies: brooding and dampening.

This study recruited 205 participants online via Amazon MTurk and used an experience sampling method to collect daily survey responses across 28 days from March to April 2020. Sentiment analysis based on Large Language Models was applied to compute daily sentiment scores from news headlines across six US news channels during the study period.

Pre-registered analyses revealed that daily anxiety scores decreased with more positive news headline sentiment in a hierarchical linear model (β main effect = -0.176, t(4064) = -4.26, p < 0.0001). However, this relationship weakened as levels of brooding and dampening increased (β interaction effect = 0.026, t(4064) = 4.98, p < 0.0001). For individuals less prone to brooding and dampening, positive news headlines were associated with reduced daily anxiety symptoms. In a separate hierarchical linear model, daily information-seeking behavior was positively correlated with daily anxiety symptoms (β main effect = 0.894, t(4068) = 7.46, p < 0.0001). Similarly, this relationship weakened as brooding and dampening levels increased (β interaction effect = -0.091, t(4068) = -6.99, p < 0.0001).

Our findings indicate that emotion regulation strategies alter the effects of news headlines sentiment and information-seeking on daily anxiety. This demonstrates the critical role of media exposure and emotional coping mechanisms in managing anxiety symptoms during a global pandemic.