Predicting Support for COVID-19 Policies with Partisan Media Use and Negative Emotion: Evidence from the U.S. and South Korea

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Abstract

While prior scholarship on preventive health behaviors has focused on identifying their cognitive predictors, emerging literature suggests that emotion may also be an important determinant of health behaviors. Drawing from appraisal theory and the discrete-emotions models of affect, the current study establishes emotional pathways to support for COVID-19 policies and social distancing behavior. Analyses of survey data collected in the U.S. and South Korea demonstrate that negative emotion experienced following partisan media use increases support for COVID-19 policies and social distancing behavior. Particularly, fear and anxiety toward the pandemic emerged as strong mediators in both countries while sadness also mediated the pathways in the U.S.

Disclosure Statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Seongcheol Kim, upon reasonable request.

Notes

¹ Data collection took place during the COVID third wave with the Delta variant surge.

² The discrepancies in data collection dates and sample sizes are due to logistical issues and funding complications. However, since there were no significant events in Korea during these two months, the discrepancies are not expected to influence findings. When we run the same analyses using a randomly selected U.S. subsample whose size is equivalent to the Korean sample, the results are largely the same; we found support for all the hypotheses, H1 through H3b, and found the same results regarding RQ1b. Regarding RQ1a, while afraid emotion still mediated the pathway to social distancing behavior, sad (b = −.0004, SE = .004, 95% C.I. [−.01, .009]) and anxious emotions (b = .02, SE = .02, 95% C.I. [−.003, .042]) were no longer significant mediators along with angry emotion.

³ The study conducted in the U.S. was determined exempt after a review by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Arizona. The study conducted in Korea was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Korea University.

⁴ Indexes of mediation are as follows: in Korea involving social distancing (b = .005, SE = .01, 95% C.I. [−.011, .022] and policy support (b = −.01, SE = .01, 95% C.I. [−.022, .006]), and in the U.S. involving social distancing (b = .02, SE = .01, 95% C.I. [.006, .033]) and policy support (b = .02, SE = .01, 95% C.I. [.003, .044]).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea, the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A3A2099973), and the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT) Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2023-2020-0-01749) supervised by the IITP (Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation).