What Constant
Exposure To Negative News Is Doing To Our Mental Health
It's nearly impossible to turn on the TV, open up a
web browser, or scroll through Twitter without being assaulted with
notifications of a new world disaster (or two, or three...). Thanks to the
24-hour news cycle, alerts of shootings, plane crashes, ISIS beheadings, crime,
war and human rights violations are constant -- and this incessant news of
violence and destruction may be messing with our heads.
The world isn't falling apart, but it can sure feel like it. The news can be
violent, depressing and emotionally-charged.
"Terrorism is
newsworthy because it is inherently dramatic and threatening," political scientist Shana
Gadarian wrote in The Washington Post in October. "Media competition means that journalists and
editors have incentives to use emotionally powerful visuals and story lines to
gain and maintain ever-shrinking news audiences."
This may be driven
partly by our natural negativity bias, which leads us to pay more attention to things that
are dangerous or threatening.
According to some psychologists, exposure to negative
and violent media may have serious and long-lasting psychological effects
beyond simple feelings of pessimism or disapproval. The work of British
psychologist Dr. Graham Davey, who specializes in the psychological effects of
media violence, suggests that violent media exposure can exacerbate or
contribute to the development of stress, anxiety, depression and even
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
"Negative news can significantly change an
individual’s mood -- especially if there is a tendency in the news broadcasts
to emphasize suffering and also the emotional components of the story,"
Davey told The Huffington Post. "In particular... negative news can affect
your own personal worries. Viewing negative news means that you’re likely to
see your own personal worries as more threatening and severe, and when you do start
worrying about them, you’re more likely to find your worry difficult to control
and more distressing than it would normally be."
According to Davey, the way that negative news affects
your mood can also have a larger affect on how you interpret and interact with
the world around you. If it makes you more anxious or sad for instance, then
you may subconsciously become more attuned to negative or threatening events,
and you may be more likely to see ambiguous or neutral events as negative ones.
On a neurological level, when we're confronted with
images of violence, we know that images or videos depicting violence are
categorically different from actual violence -- so we don't process the input
as threatening stimuli. However, we internalize the negative stimuli, which can
affect mood and cause one to feel more negatively towards the environment more
broadly.
"These images change our overall mood to a more
negative one -- more sad or more anxious -- and it is this change in mood that
leads to psychological changes in the way we attend to things around us (e.g.
we are more likely to pick out things in our environment that are potentially
negative or threatening)," Davey explains. "This can have a vicious
cycle effect on mood generally for some time."
Some research has even
suggested that viewing traumatic images in the media can cause PTSD-like
symptoms. A 2001 study found
that watching the events of 9/11 on television was enough to trigger PTSD
symptoms -- such as worrying about future terrorist attacks and reduced
self-confidence -- in some viewers. Severity of symptoms, interestingly, was
directly correlated with the amount of time the subjects spent watching
television.
A recent study also
found that being frequently exposed to graphic, uncensored images of violence
is emotionally distressing to many journalists working in newsroom settings.
The journalists who were regularly exposed to violent video footage scored
higher on indexes of PTSD -- including re-experiencing, avoidance and general
anxiety -- as well as increased alcohol consumption, depression, and
somatization (physical signs of distress in the body).
The researchers noted
that over time, exposure to graphic violence can cause a process of either sensitization, in which
the individuals becomes more sensitive to emotional distress upon viewing the
images, or desensitization -- a sort of numbing process in which individuals
become habituated to what they see -- to occur. This numbing effect, which
causes the brain to exhibit less of an emotional response to disturbing
stimuli, has been observed in those who have been repeatedly exposed to violent
video games.
The diagnostic criteria for PTSD -- which was appended
for the DSM-5 to recognize that not only experiencing something traumatic
oneself but also witness a life-threatening trauma to another could lead to
symptoms of the disorder -- acknowledges this to some degree. Davey notes,
however, that the DSM description does say that these events should be
witnessed in person.
Of course, it's
important to note that exposure to negative news is unlikely to cause
depression, anxiety or PTSD in individuals who are not already prone to these
conditions. But it can still lead to a pessimism and world-weariness that leads
us to perceive the state of the world in an overly negative light -- leading us
to ignore and overshadow the many things that are working.
What's clear from this
research is that more positive news is needed to outweigh the violence and
destruction we're exposed to every day. As psychologist Steven Pinker and international
studies professor Andrew Mack write in Slate, the world is not going to hell in
a handbasket, despite what the headlines suggest. Violence has actually decreased, and
quality of life has improved for millions of people. Journalism should reflect
these truths.
As Positive News
founder Sean Dagan Wood said in a recent TED talk,
"A more positive form of journalism will not only benefit our well-being;
it will engage us in society, and it will help catalyze potential solutions to
the problems that we face."
Carolyn
Gregoire http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/violent-media-anxiety_n_6671732.html?ir=Healthy%20Living&ncid=newsltushpmg00000003
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