ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It has been retracted, and should not be counted. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- An Experimental Study of Effects of Media Implication on Self-Report Symptoms Related With MP Use.Frontiers in public health · 2020Trial
- Factors Influencing Anxiety Among WeChat Users During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Mainland China: Cross-sectional Survey Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- Neutral and threatening distracter word stimuli are unnecessarily stored in working memory but do not differ in their degree of working memory storage.Biological psychology · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
- Retraction · 2020-12-17Error in Data · Error in Methods · Error in Results and/or Conclusions ·
- Retracted
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Media exposure influences mental health symptomology in response to salient aversive events, like terrorist attacks, but little has been done to explore the impact of news coverage that varies more subtly in affective content. Here, we utilized an existing data set in which participants self-reported physical symptoms, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms, and completed a potentiated startle task assessing their physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli at three time points (waves) over a 9-month period. Using a computational linguistics approach, we then calculated an average ratio of words with positive vs. negative affective connotations for only articles from news sources to which each participant self-reported being exposed over the prior 2 weeks at each wave of data collection. As hypothesized, individuals exposed to news coverage with more negative affective tone over the prior 2 weeks reported significantly greater physical and depressive symptoms, and had significantly greater physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.