Consuming memes during the COVID pandemic: Effects of memes and meme type on COVID-related stress and coping efficacy.

Abstract

As COVID-19 quickly spread across the globe, social media memes (i.e., typically humorous or cute images related to popular culture) about life in a pandemic also spread across the Internet. We conducted a between-subjects online experiment (N = 748) to assess how viewing memes during this pandemic era may influence audiences' stress and coping. In terms of psychological responses, we found that meme viewing (vs. nonmeme content) was associated with stronger cuteness responses, higher levels of reported humor, more positive emotions, and lower levels of information processing. However, meme viewing was not associated with state anxiety, COVID-19-related stress, or COVID-19-related coping efficacy. Furthermore, because memes generated positive emotions that were in turn related to increased COVID-19 coping efficacy, a path analysis found that viewing memes, as compared with nonmeme content, indirectly increased COVID-19 coping efficacy. Looking at the effects of meme type, we found that memes featuring animals were rated as cuter than memes with humans, though the former engendered lower information processing and predicted lower coping efficacy than did human memes. Cuteness responses, generally, were associated with decreased coping efficacy. In contrast, meme captions related to COVID-19 were related to deeper information processing and lower levels of COVID-19-related stress than were captions unrelated to COVID-19. Information processing was, in turn, associated with increased coping efficacy. This research demonstrates that memes, particularly those that relate to a highly stressful context, may help support efforts to cope with the stressor. Public Policy Relevance StatementCompared with viewing other media content, viewing memes resulted in Internet users experiencing greater humor and positive emotions. When Internet users viewed memes with captions focused on COVID-19, they reported lower COVID-19-related stress levels than if they viewed memes focused on other topics, suggesting that tackling a stressor directly with humorous popular media content can benefit our emotional state and stress levels.

Mental health memes: beneficial or aversive in relation to psychiatric symptoms?

“…Possible benefits of mental health memes Members of the general population display increased positive emotional responses when observing humorous internet memes, relative to other forms of online media (Myrick et al, 2021). In the current context, a culmination of research highlights perceived benefits associated with online interaction with mental health memes (Akram et al, 2020;Drury, 2019;Gardener et al, 2021;Kariko and Anasih, 2019).…”

“…Internet memes related to non-traumatic situational work experiences are evidenced to help emergency medical service providers cope with work-related stress and burnout (Drury, 2019). Furthermore, anxious individuals observe memes related to the COVID-19 pandemic to cope with an uncertain and anxiety provoking situation Myrick et al, 2021). In a sample of the US general population, Myrick and colleagues (2021) found the observation of COVID captioned memes to be associated with reduced COVID-related stress relative to those observing memes unrelated to the pandemic.…”

Exploring the effect of organization–employee relationships on employee communication behaviors on social media: The moderating role of position level.

“…Social media has become an important source of information (Bradley et al, 2019). Myrick et al (2021) recently examined the effects of viewing social media memes and found that memes with captions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic led to deeper information processing. According to Thom-Santelli et al (2011), junior-level employees working at IBM used its social networking site more frequently than others to process information on culture and values.…”

Effects and perception of multimodal recontextualization in political Internet memes. Evidence from two online experiments in Austria

“…Other studies dedicated to the effects of political memes found that the consumption of memes has positive effects on users' political engagement (Zhang and Pinto, 2021;Johann, 2022) and that the memetic presentation of credible information results in higher levels of engagement, such as commenting and sharing political memes (Wasike, 2022). Moreover, studies inside and outside the political context have shown that memes trigger users' emotions and subtle perceptions of the presented messages (Williams et al, 2016;Akram et al, 2020;Gardner et al, 2021) and that humor plays an important role as an enabler of cognitive and affective outcomes (Gardner et al, 2021;Myrick et al, 2021;Wong and Holyoak, 2021).…”