Social Media Exposure and College Students' Mental Health During the Outbreak of COVID-19: The Mediating Role of Rumination and the Moderating Role of Mindfulness

Abstract

In response to reports of people experiencing varying levels of anxiety and depression during the outbreak of COVID-19, researchers have argued that exposure to related information on social media is a salient contributing factor. Based on the integrated model of ruminative response style and the diathesis-stress model, it has been suggested that incorporating rumination and mindfulness may elucidate the potential mechanism underlying the aforementioned association. This study aimed to examine the mediating role of rumination and the moderating role of mindfulness in the association between social media exposure (SME) to COVID-19 information and psychological distress. The results from online questionnaire responses of 439 college students from two universities in Wuhan, Hubei Province, showed that rumination mediated the association between SME and psychological distress. Furthermore, mindfulness was revealed as a protective factor that buffered the adverse effect of SME on psychological distress through rumination. These findings advance a better understanding of the formation process of psychological symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide insights regarding effective interventions for adverse mental health consequences in college students.

Feasibility of a Brief Online Mindfulness and Compassion-Based Intervention to Promote Mental Health Among University Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…As these and other studies have pointed out, the young adult population is a risk group for COVID-19 at a psychological level (Huang & Zhao, 2020;Ozamiz-Etxebarria et al, 2020). The deep psychological impact that the lockdown has had on university students could be caused by stress triggered by excessive social media consumption (Hong et al, 2020;Zhao & Zhou, 2020). Indeed, during the COVID-19 crisis there has been a spread of misinformation, fake news, and alarming images in social media, which could amplify fear, anxiety, stress, and worry (Ozamiz-Etxebarria et al, 2020;Zhao & Zhou, 2020).…”

Perceived Stress and Coping Strategies Among Undergraduate Health Science Students of Jimma University Amid the COVID-19 Outbreak: Online Cross-Sectional Survey

“…Inconsistent recommendations and messaging by health/government authorities leads to confusion or omitting steps or making other errors which can result in an increased risk of contamination and infection, which ultimately distress the individual (Peters et al, 2020). There is evidence that social media exposure is associated with psychological distress among college students (Hong et al, 2020) and similarly, poor social interaction (less sharing of ideas with friends, families, and community) influenced students' perceptions of stress (Stoliker and Lafreniere, 2015). In the current study, students who rarely talk/chat with their friends online were at a more than fourfold higher risk of having high perceived stress compared with those who talk/chat every day in the current pandemic.…”

Media exposure predicts acute stress and probable acute stress disorder during the early COVID-19 outbreak in China

“…Generally, media was the main source of pandemic-related information for the majority of people during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. However, long term media exposure is likely to reinforce rumination and intrusive thoughts, activate fear circuitry ( Bourne, Mackay & Holmes, 2013 ; Holman, Garfin & Silver, 2014 ; Hong et al, 2020 ), amplify the perception of risk ( Chao et al, 2020 ; Garfin, Silver & Holman, 2020 ), even enhance autonomic activation and affect physiologic systems ( Watkins, 2008 ; Brosschot, 2010 ; Gerin et al, 2012 ), all of which may lead to the increase of acute stress and the development of probable ASD. This is also consistent with several findings that trauma-related media exposure could predict negative psychological symptoms, such as PTSD ( Palgi, Shrira & Hoffman, 2017 ), insomnia ( Goodwin, Lemola & Ben-Ezra, 2018 ), anxiety, depression, and stress ( Chao et al, 2020 ; Gao et al, 2020 ).…”