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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1570747
This article is part of the Research Topic The influence of Internet and technology on mental health and psychological adjustment of young adults View all 3 articles
Sympathy towards people infected with COVID-19 mediates relations between media use and death anxiety
Provisionally accepted- 1 Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China
- 2 School of Global Public Health, New York University Shanghai, Shanghai, China
The COVID-19 pandemic threatened mental health. This study examined the longitudinal associations among pandemic-related media use, sympathy for people infected with COVID-19 (PIWC), and death anxiety. 132 Chinese adults completed measures three times, one week apart during the initial phase of COVID. The results showed that media use, sympathy, and death anxiety decreased significantly over the first month of the outbreak. Pandemic-related media use predicted increased future sympathy for PIWC, and sympathy predicted increased future death anxiety. The study identified the short-term effects of media use on sympathy and death anxiety, and suggests that reduced media exposure may be beneficial.
Keywords: Media Use, sympathy, Death Anxiety, COVID-19, Longitudinal
Received: 04 Feb 2025; Accepted: 24 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chao, Liu, Xue, Zhang and Hall. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Bin Zhang, Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, 300387, China
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