COVID-19-Related News Consumption Linked with Stress and Worry, but Not Sleep Quality, Early in the Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Beginning in early 2020, the novel coronavirus was the subject of frequent and sustained news coverage. Building on prior literature on the stress-inducing effects of consuming news during a large-scale crisis, we used network analysis to investigate the association between coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) news consumption, COVID-19-related psychological stress, worries about oneself and one’s loved ones getting COVID-19, and sleep quality. Data were collected in March 2020 from 586 adults (45.2% female; 72.9% White) recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk in the U.S. Participants completed online surveys assessing attitudes and behaviors related to COVID-19 and a questionnaire assessing seven domains of sleep quality. Networks were constructed using partial regularized correlation matrices. As hypothesized, COVID-19 news consumption was positively associated with COVID-19-related psychological stress and concerns about one’s loved ones getting COVID-19. However, there were very few associations between COVID-19 news consumption and sleep quality indices, and gender did not moderate any of the observed relationships. This study replicates and extends previous findings that COVID-19-news consumption is linked with psychological stress related to the pandemic, but even under such conditions, sleep quality can be spared due to the pandemic allowing for flexibility in morning work/school schedules.

KEYWORDS:

• Pandemic
• sleep
• stress
• network analysis

Acknowledgments

Ilana Ladis is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. 1842490. Chenlu Gao is supported by the Alzheimer’s Association (AARFD-22-928372), the BrightFocus Foundation (A2020886S), and the National Institute on Aging (RF1AG059867). Michael K. Scullin is supported by the National Science Foundation (1920730, 1943323). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Baylor University.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Availability of data and material

Data analyzed for the study are available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/ey3fz/

Code availability

Code used to analyze data is available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/qgtxy/

Authors’ contributions

Ilana Ladis: Conceptualization, Formal Analysis, Writing – Original Draft, Writing –Review & Editing, Visualization .Chenlu Gao: Methodology, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision. Michael K. Scullin: Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2022.2141281

Notes

1. While other studies have used network analysis to examine the association between sleep problems and anxiety during the pandemic (e.g., Cai et al., 2022; Tao et al., 2022), none to our knowledge have analyzed pandemic-related news consumption.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (1842490 to IL, 1920730 and 1943323 to MKS). Chenlu Gao is supported by the Alzheimer’s Association (AARFD-22-928372), the BrightFocus Foundation. (A2020886S), and the National Institute on Aging (RF1AG059867). The funding source had no role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication; Alzheimer’s Association