Dynamics of perceived threat and media exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic media landscape was characterized by an unrelenting stream of disease-related information that varied in tone, factual accuracy, and degree of ascribed certainty. Given the increasing centrality and integration of media technology in daily life, examining how media exposure contributed to individuals' experiences coping with the threat of COVID-19 is crucial. In this study, we used longitudinal data from 3189 primarily North American participants, collected monthly from June 2020 through January 2021 to examine reciprocal associations among media exposure, COVID-19 thought frequency, and perceived threat of COVID-19 at the within-person level of analysis. Drawing on a transactional model of stress and coping to frame our investigation, we hypothesized that increases from one's typical level of media exposure, COVID-19 thought frequency, or perceived threat of COVID-19 in a given month would predict increases in these variables in the subsequent month. Apart from the effect of media exposure on perceived threat of COVID-19, results from random intercept cross-lagged panel models supported our hypotheses, revealing cyclical effects at the within-person level. Additionally, between-person associations indicated that those who scored highly on any of the three study variables, also tended to score highly on the others. Effects at the within-person level suggest a potential vicious cycle of media exposure, COVID-19 thought frequency and perceived threat of COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic. The findings aid in identifying targets for intervention that can be leveraged to mitigate adverse physical and mental health impacts in the context of future pandemics and other global crises. • Longitudinal examination of COVID-19 threat, thought frequency, and media exposure. • Results reveal both between-person associations and within-person reciprocal effects. • Increased media exposure predicts subsequent increase in COVID-19 thought frequency. • COVID-19 thought frequency predicts increases in media exposure and perceived threat. • Perceived threat predicts increases in COVID-19 thought frequency and media exposure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".