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A joint study by Chinese and American researchers suggests that excessive use of social media during a pandemic can cause secondary depression and trauma. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Canton University in Canton to Computers in human behavior In their study, published in the scientific journal Wuhan in Central China, they surveyed 320 people living in Wuhan, central China, on how WeChat, the most popular Chinese social network, followed events during the epidemic.
Bu Zhong, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the study, said his research team began investigating the effects of social media use on people’s mental health immediately after the curfew was ordered in Wuhan. to stop the coronavirus epidemic.
Social portals are not necessarily credible, unlike trustworthy news portals, according to a US survey.
We did not expect the epidemic to go global. We think that we might discover some invisible damages from the epidemic. In China, local media did not report on Covid-19. If someone relied on reading local newspapers or watching television, they would not receive information about the virus. This put people under severe stress, so they began to rely heavily on social media.
The researcher explained.
Previous research has shown that in times of crisis, more people rely on social media to find and share medical information.
The authors of the new study found that more than half of the participants experienced some form of depression, although they did not experience any trauma or depressive disorder before the epidemic. About twenty percent of the participants experienced moderate or severe depression, and just over twenty percent experienced moderate or severe secondary trauma.
We speak of secondary trauma when people hear about the traumatic experiences of others.
Based on the stress model, the researchers found that excessive use of social media was associated with much more severe levels of depression and secondary trauma.
At least that’s what came up with the first experimental research on this, but there are still a lot of unsolved problems.
Researchers creating a stress scale don’t want people to book social media as a bad thing. According to the experts, as in everything, the appropriate moderation should be sought when using it. This is because if someone checks the news on their phone every few minutes, they put themselves under even more stress.
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