Youth Anxiety About Political News
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Youth Anxiety About Political News Nicole E. Caporino1 · Shannon Exley1 · Robert D. Latzman2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study assessed youth anxiety about political issues and associated characteristics. Caregivers (N = 374) were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and reported on their child’s anxiety about 15 voting issues covered in the media since the 2016 presidential election as well as their child’s psychological functioning and their own trait anxiety. For the majority of voting issues, over 50% of caregivers indicated that their child experienced at least one related worry; worries about the environment and gun violence were most common. Youth empathy and intolerance of uncertainty were each positively associated with worry about political issues but did not predict such worry after accounting for the effect of youth trait anxiety. Youth with clinical levels of generalized anxiety experienced more severe worry about political issues than did youth with minimal/subthreshold anxiety. Future studies should identify strategies for mitigating the negative impact of political news on youth with anxiety disorders. Keywords Anxiety · Children · Adolescents · Assessment · Media · Politics News consumption has increased with advances in technology (e.g., mobile devices) and the rise of social media [1]. On average, youth watch up to 4.5 h of television/day [2–4] and adolescents spend as much time online as they do watching television [3]. Media use has been associated with elevated perceptions of the world as threatening [5] and repeated exposure to news stories involving violence may result in posttraumatic stress symptoms, anxiety, and depression [6–11], especially for youth with preexisting vulnerabilities (e.g., history of psychopathology) [5, 7, 12]. Relatively few studies, however, have investigated the impact of nonviolent media content on internalizing problems (e.g., anxiety, depression) in youth. This is surprising given that news of political events, though primarily nonviolent, may be interpreted by youth as threatening and result in distress. Research on emotional reactions to political news has primarily sampled adults due to their ability to vote [13]. There has been little, if any, attention to youth emotional reactions to political news. * Nicole E. Caporino [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA
Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
2
Whether or not political news is interpreted by youth as distressing may be influenced by the events/policies reported (i.e., how likely they are to affect the child or his/her loved ones), the child’s cognitive capacity to understand the news and its potential implications, and discussions about news or politics that take place in his/her environment (e.g., at home and at school). Trait anxiety, which is related to hypervigilance to threat [14] and biased info
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