Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Aug 2, 2021
Date Accepted: Oct 27, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Dec 6, 2021
The Impact of COVID-19 Infodemic on Depression and Sleep Disorders; Focusing On Uncertainty Reduction Strategies and Level of Interpretation Theory
ABSTRACT
Background:
Along with the pandemic situation, information diffusion about the COVID-19 has attracted public attention through SM. WHO (World Health Organization) declared a term “infodemic” that indicates “overwhelming amounts of information about COVID-19;” the misinformation and disinformation from SM could promote adverse psychological effects.
Objective:
The current study uses the hypothetical distance of construal level to predict peoples’ negative psychological symptoms from social media usage. The psychological distance of construal-level theory (CLT) intends to show peoples’ psychological proximity about objects and events, applied to the COVID-19 pandemic situation for this study. Also, this study links the uncertainty reduction strategy (URS) and CLT to preventive behaviors of COVID-19 and affective reactions to see their effects on mental health problems.
Methods:
With an online survey, the social media users were asked to answer their social media usage behavior, concern on COVID-19, URS, hypothetical distance with COVID-19, preventive behaviors, affective reactions, and psychological disorders symptoms including anxiety and sleep disorder.
Results:
After measuring participants’ SM usage behavior, it is concluded that an increase in general SM usage led to the use of URS and higher construal-level (CL) on COVID-19. The URS results in preventive behaviors, but CLT doesn’t show any association with preventive behaviors while it increases affective reactions. Moreover, increased preventive behavior reduced symptoms of mental health problems, i.e. depression, and sleep disorders. However, the affective reaction tends to be positively associated with depression and sleep disorder.
Conclusions:
Due to the “infodemic” of COVID-19, the pandemic situation’s psychological perception negatively influenced users’ psychological symptoms. The findings of this study imply that the information from SM usage heightened the concerns. Still, SM users with higher URS equip preventive behavior, which lowers the mental problems, while those with lower URS and more emotional reaction show negative mental symptoms.
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