TITLE: News Media Exposure, Stress and Psychological Well-Being ABSTRACT: Technological advances made during the twentieth century have resulted in significant increases in the immediacy and graphic nature of printing, radio and television coverage of current events. Escalating competition among news providers has also resulted in an increase in the negative, sensation content of news programming. This era of burgeoning communications technologies has also been marked by increasing perceptions of stress accompanied by rising rates of depression and anxiety about health and safety among the general public. It is the premise of this project that exposure to the news media contributes to these increased perceptions of stress levels and emotional distress. However, despite the intuitive logic underlying this hypothesis, few studies have assessed the role of the news media as a source of stress. This project is designed to explore the relationship between exposure to the news media, stress and emotional well-being. The subjects in this study will be randomly selected from the San Antonio community and will be reimbursed monetarily for participation in the study. They will be interviewed by telephone regarding their media viewing habits, stress levels as assessed by their perceptions of their own resource loss in the past and future, depression, anxiety,, monitoring or blunting information seeking style, irrational beliefs, and optimistic/pessimistic attributional style are expected to moderate the relationship between media exposure and stress. The impact of gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status on these relationships will also be evaluated. Finally, comparisons will be made between television, radio and print news sources in terms of their differential effects on stress responses. An empirical understanding of the relationship between media exposure, stress, emotional distress and cognitive style will make a valuable contribution to the ongoing public debate regarding the appropriate role of the media in society. Such information will also facilitate the development of clinical stress management techniques to assist those individuals who are vulnerable to this form of stress as a result of their psychological characteristics or prior stressful experiences.
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