Perceived risk, emotions, and stress in response to COVID‐19: The interplay of media use and partisanship

Abstract

Relationships between risk perceptions, emotions, and stress are well‐documented, as are interconnections between stress, emotion, and media use. During the early COVID‐19 pandemic, the public responded psychologically to the threat posed by the pandemic, and frequently utilized media for information and entertainment. However, we lack a comprehensive picture of how perceived risk, emotion, stress, and media affected each other longitudinally during this time. Further, although response to the pandemic was highly politicized, research has yet to address how partisan affiliation moderated relationships between risk, emotion, stress, and media use over time. This three‐wave ( N = 1021) panel study assessed the interplay of risk, emotion, stress, and media use for Americans with different political affiliations between March and May of 2020. Findings indicate that perceived risk, emotion, and stress at Time 1 predicted media use at Time 2, with predictors varying by type of media. Use of entertainment media and social/mobile media predicted later stress (Time 3), but news consumption did not. Later risk perceptions (Time 3) were not influenced by media use at Time 2. The predictors and consequences of different types of media use were notably different for Republicans and Democrats. In particular, risk perceptions predicted greater news use among Democrats but greater entertainment media use among Republicans. Moreover, social/mobile media use resulted in perceiving the risks of COVID‐19 as less serious for Republicans while increasing stress over time for Democrats.

Social identification and risk dynamics: how perceptions of (inter)personal and collective risk impact the adoption of COVID-19 preventative behaviours

“…This has been shown across a range of pandemics (Tang and Wong, 2004;Rubin et al, 2009;Kim et al, 2015;Webster et al, 2020). The effects of risk perception have been demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic across a range of behaviours, influencing, for example, hand washing (Wise et al, 2020;Cabrera-Alvarez et al, 2022), physical distancing (Abu-Akel et al, 2021;Rothgerber et al, 2020;Wise et al, 2020), self-isolation and lockdown adherence (Siegrist et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2020), vaccination intentions and uptake (Caserotti et al, 2021;Butter et al, 2022), and engagement with relevant media (Zhou et al, 2022).…”

Social identification and risk dynamics: How perceptions of (inter)personal and collective risk impact the adoption of COVID‐19 preventative behaviors

“…This has been shown across a range of pandemics (Kim et al., 2015 ; Rubin et al., 2009 ; Tang & Wong, 2004 ; Webster et al., 2020 ). The effects of risk perception have been demonstrated during the COVID‐19 pandemic across a range of behaviors, influencing, for example, hand washing (Cabrera‐Alvarez et al., 2022 ; Wise et al., 2020 ), physical distancing (Abu‐Akel et al., 2021 ; Rothgerber et al., 2020 ; Wise et al., 2020 ), self‐isolation and lockdown adherence (Siegrist et al., 2021 ; Smith et al., 2020 ), vaccination intentions and uptake (Butter et al., 2022 ; Caserotti et al., 2021 ), and engagement with relevant media (Zhou et al., 2022 ).…”