“Politics as a chronic stressor”: News about politics bums you out and can make you feel ill — but it also makes you take action - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard | Canada News Media
“Politics as a chronic stressor”: News about politics bums you out and can make you feel ill — but it also makes you take action – Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard
Who would buy a product that reliably makes them sad, or anxious, or worried, or overwhelmed?
You wouldn’t go to a restaurant you knew made you feel ill, or listen to music that drove you up a wall, or go to a gym where the equipment gives you a new muscle tear every visit. You might do it once or twice, maaaaybe three times — but it’s unlikely you’d keep signing up for more pain, day after day.
And yet for many people, that’s exactly what they experience reading the news — especially news about politics. The act of consuming political news is, for them, just misery — a daily reminder of terrible things over which they have essentially no control. That’s particularly true for people who don’t have a strong attachment to a party or candidate; committed partisans at least get the occasional joy of seeing their side win the news cycle — for everybody else, it’s just a lot of noise.
We’ve writtenbeforeaboutthephenomenonof news avoidance and the evidence that it’s on the rise in many places, thanks to some mix of the coronavirus, Donald Trump, and the general sense that politics has gotten uglier. And some new research out of Canada shows some of the ways political news leaves people down in the dumps.
The paper’s by Matthew Feinberg, Brett Q. Ford, Sabrina Thai, Arasteh Gatchpazian, and Bethany Lassetter. (All but Thai are at the University of Toronto; Thai is at Brock University.) It’s a preprint, meaning it hasn’t yet faced peer review, but here’s the abstract, emphases mine:
Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics is largely unknown. Here, we conceptualize politics as a chronic stressor with important consequences for people’s daily lives.
We used longitudinal, daily-diary methods to track U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across two weeks (Study 1: N=198, observations=2,167) and, separately, across three weeks (Study 2: N=811, observations=12,790) to explore how daily political events permeate people’s lives and how they cope with this influence of politics.
In both studies, daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions, which corresponded to worse psychological and physical well-being, but also increased motivation to take political action (e.g., volunteer, protest) aimed at changing the political system that evoked these emotions in the first place.
Understandably, people frequently tried to regulate their politics-induced emotions; and successfully regulating these emotions using cognitive strategies (reappraisal and distraction) predicted greater well-being, but also weaker motivation to take action.
Although people can protect themselves from the emotional impact of politics, frequently-used regulation strategies appear to come with a trade-off between well-being and action. To examine whether an alternative approach to one’s emotions could avoid this trade-off, we measured emotional acceptance in Study 2 (i.e., accepting one’s emotions without trying to change them) and found that successful acceptance predicted greater daily well-being but no impairment to political action.
Overall, this research highlights how politics can be a chronic stressor in people’s daily lives, underscoring the far-reaching influence politicians have beyond the formal powers endowed unto them.
In the two studies, Feinberg et al. asked more than 1,000 Americans to keep a daily diary for either 14 or 21 days. At the end of each day, they were to record the political story they’d thought about most that day and their emotional responses to it. They were also asked to report other more general details about their psychological and physical well-being and their motivation to take any political action.
Here’s an example of one person’s 14-day diary. The blue line marks how negative their emotional response to politics was that day — here, high means more negative, low means more positive. The red dashed line is a general measure of the person’s psychological well-being. You can see that the two lines seem to move in similar ways. On days 4 and 8, when they didn’t think about politics, they were feeling pretty good, all things considered. On the days with big political news — a government shutdown, a Dreamer being deported, a major protest — not so much.
The diaries were kept in two waves, one in late 2017/early 2018 and one in late 2018 (during debates over Donald Trump’s impeachment). What did the researchers find in that first wave?
Results indicate that day-to-day political events commonly evoke negative emotional reactions.
When thinking about the most salient political event of the day — even though our prompt was designed to be neutral and did not specifically ask about negative events — people felt at least some degree of any negative emotion (i.e., above the lowest scale point) on 81% of the days and felt stronger levels of any negative emotion (i.e., at or above the scale midpoint) on 45% of the days.
And those negative emotions were indeed associated with feeling worse, psychologically and physically. “Similarly, within-person effects indicated that when participants felt more negative emotion on a given day than they typically felt in response to a political event, they experienced worse psychological well-being and worse physical well-being.” And the results remained robust even after controlling for variables like age, gender, income, and ethnicity.
Politics can really ruin your day, in other words. In this study, Democrats and liberals had more negative emotional reactions to politics than did Republicans and conservatives — but it’s hard to discern how much of that is about partisanship and how much is just about the specific content of political news on the days being measured.
With those surveys in the books, researchers went back for a larger and more diverse group of people a few months later. The first study was specifically of people who said they think about politics on a daily basis; the second one didn’t have that requirement. Again, it found that politics tends to bum people out:
People felt at least some degree of any negative emotion (i.e., above the lowest scale point) on 75% of the days and felt stronger levels of any negative emotion (i.e., at or above the scale midpoint) on 53% of the days.
Do negative emotions about politics predict worse well-being? Replicating Study 1, stronger negative emotional responses to politics, in turn, were associated with worse psychological and physical well-being at the between-person and within-person level.
Many of the subjects reported using some sort of strategy to deal with their negative emotions, like “cognitive reappraisal; e.g., reminding oneself that a situation is not as bad as it seems, or that even bad situations can have silver linings,” “distraction; e.g., tuning out of distressing conversations, or changing the channel from upsetting news stories,” or choosing to “hide their emotions from others in daily life (expressive suppression).”
For those of us in the news media, distraction is the most germane technique, being tied to news avoidance. In the first study, subjects reported trying to distract themselves from politics on 80 percent of days. Those who did felt better, reporting lower levels of negative emotion, but crunching the numbers found successful distraction wasn’t a “significant predictor of negative emotions.”
In the second study, subjects reported trying to distract themselves on 56 percent of days, down from the first one. (Seems logical, given that the second study included people who think about politics less often.)
But…successfully distracting one’s self from politics also, predictably, reduced subjects’ interest in taking any form of political action — attending a protest, volunteering for a campaign, donating to a candidate, calling their senators, and so on. In other words, political news might make you feel miserable, but that misery can be very useful in prompting you to do something about it. That finding proved consistent among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
I should note that this paper looks at the impact of thinking about day-to-day political happenings — not, explicitly, the day-to-day consumption of political journalism. But the two are so tightly intertwined that it’s hard to put much analytical space between them; media reporting is overwhelmingly the conduit that brings these political happenings to their attention.
Although most day-to-day political events occur far away in state and national capitals, politics and its controversies have become a salient part of everyday life for many in the general public. The day’s political events are a common, if not central, topic of conversation in both online and offline contexts. Political discord and scandal headline the news cycle, are joked about on late-night TV programs, and are debated at the dinner table and around the office water cooler. Yet as central as politics is to people’s everyday experience, its impact on people’s daily life is largely unknown.
[…]
In line with the conceptualization of politics as a chronic stressor, we found that daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions in participants. These negative emotions predicted worse day-to-day psychological and physical health, but also greater motivation to take action aimed at changing the political system that evoked the negative emotions in the first place at both the between-person (interpersonal difference) and within-person (intrapersonal difference) levels.
Furthermore, we found that people commonly employed emotion regulation strategies to cope with this chronic stressor. Particularly when successfully using reappraisal, people experienced greater well-being, but less motivation to take political action, pointing to a fundamental trade-off between protecting oneself and taking action that arises when people regulate their politics-related emotions.
In Study 2, we found a potential means for overcoming this trade-off: Participants who used emotional acceptance — a coping strategy that involves accepting emotions rather than trying to change them — experienced higher levels of well-being, but showed no signs of decreased motivation to take action. In all, our results highlight the broad impact daily political events have on the average person, revealing the political is quite personal.
[…]
Our research shows that using certain commonly used forms of emotion regulation to protect well-being can come at a fundamental cost to taking action — an important trade-off that can occur when individuals successfully down-regulate their negative emotional responses to daily politics…
For instance, feeling outrage toward an injustice might initially compel people to join a street protest, but if they use reappraisal to convince themselves the justice system will prosecute the perpetrators, their outrage may diminish along with the likelihood of actually joining the protest.
Similarly, if they employ distraction, possibly because they find their outrage too intense to reappraise, they may divert their attention from the injustice, thereby minimizing their likelihood of taking to the street.
Such insights are important for activists seeking to mobilize widespread collective action. To effectively harness people’s negative emotions, activists need people to not reduce those emotions. Finding strategies that achieve this end should help activists facilitate greater action. Yet, it may come at the expense of people’s well-being, suggesting a complicated ethical trade-off between mobilizing people for a cause and impairing the well-being of those taking action.
Journalists who write about politics or who program cable news shows face a similar trade-off: Making people mad at the “other side” can be an effective way to harvest their attention — but it can come at the cost of making them miserable.
Some people are news junkies, and they’ll keep coming back for more. But others are happy to go watch Netflix instead.
NEW YORK (AP) — In a new video posted early Election Day, Beyoncé channels Pamela Anderson in the television program “Baywatch” – red one-piece swimsuit and all – and asks viewers to vote.
In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, set to most of “Bodyguard,” a four-minute cut from her 2024 country album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé cosplays as Anderson’s character before concluding with a simple message, written in white text: “Happy Beylloween,” followed by “Vote.”
At a rally for Donald Trump in Pittsburgh on Monday night, the former president spoke dismissively about Beyoncé’s appearance at a Kamala Harris rally in Houston in October, drawing boos for the megastar from his supporters.
“Beyoncé would come in. Everyone’s expecting a couple of songs. There were no songs. There was no happiness,” Trump said.
She did not perform — unlike in 2016, when she performed at a presidential campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland – but she endorsed Harris and gave a moving speech, initially joined onstage by her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland.
“I’m not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said.
“A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided,” she said at the rally in Houston, her hometown.
“Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what’s possible with no ceilings, no limitations,” she continued. “We must vote, and we need you.”
Harris used the song in July during her first official public appearance as a presidential candidate at her campaign headquarters in Delaware. That same month, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, publicly endorsed Harris for president.
Beyoncé gave permission to Harris to use the song, a campaign official who was granted anonymity to discuss private campaign operations confirmed to The Associated Press.
Outside of sports and a “Cold front coming down from Canada,” American news media only report on Canadian events that they believe are, or will be, influential to the US. Therefore, when Justin Trudeau’s announcement, having finally read the room, that Canada will be reducing the number of permanent residents admitted by more than 20 percent and temporary residents like skilled workers and college students will be cut by more than half made news south of the border, I knew the American media felt Trudeau’s about-face on immigration was newsworthy because many Americans would relate to Trudeau realizing Canada was accepting more immigrants than it could manage and are hoping their next POTUS will follow Trudeau’s playbook.
Canada, with lots of space and lacking convenient geographical ways for illegal immigrants to enter the country, though still many do, has a global reputation for being incredibly accepting of immigrants. On the surface, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver appear to be multicultural havens. However, as the saying goes, “Too much of a good thing is never good,” resulting in a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, which you can almost taste in the air. A growing number of Canadians, regardless of their political affiliation, are blaming recent immigrants for causing the housing affordability crises, inflation, rise in crime and unemployment/stagnant wages.
Throughout history, populations have engulfed themselves in a tribal frenzy, a psychological state where people identify strongly with their own group, often leading to a ‘us versus them’ mentality. This has led to quick shifts from complacency to panic and finger-pointing at groups outside their tribe, a phenomenon that is not unique to any particular culture or time period.
My take on why the American news media found Trudeau’s blatantly obvious attempt to save his political career, balancing appeasement between the pitchfork crowd, who want a halt to immigration until Canada gets its house in order, and immigrant voters, who traditionally vote Liberal, newsworthy; the American news media, as do I, believe immigration fatigue is why Kamala Harris is going to lose on November 5th.
Because they frequently get the outcome wrong, I don’t take polls seriously. According to polls in 2014, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were in a dead heat in Ontario, yet Wynne won with more than twice as many seats. In the 2018 Quebec election, most polls had the Coalition Avenir Québec with a 1-to-5-point lead over the governing Liberals. The result: The Coalition Avenir Québec enjoyed a landslide victory, winning 74 of 125 seats. Then there’s how the 2016 US election polls showing Donald Trump didn’t have a chance of winning against Hillary Clinton were ridiculously way off, highlighting the importance of the election day poll and, applicable in this election as it was in 2016, not to discount ‘shy Trump supporters;’ voters who support Trump but are hesitant to express their views publicly due to social or political pressure.
My distrust in polls aside, polls indicate Harris is leading by a few points. One would think that Trump’s many over-the-top shenanigans, which would be entertaining were he not the POTUS or again seeking the Oval Office, would have him far down in the polls. Trump is toe-to-toe with Harris in the polls because his approach to the economy—middle-class Americans are nostalgic for the relatively strong economic performance during Trump’s first three years in office—and immigration, which Americans are hyper-focused on right now, appeals to many Americans. In his quest to win votes, Trump is doing what anyone seeking political office needs to do: telling the people what they want to hear, strategically using populism—populism that serves your best interests is good populism—to evoke emotional responses. Harris isn’t doing herself any favours, nor moving voters, by going the “But, but… the orange man is bad!” route, while Trump cultivates support from “weird” marginal voting groups.
To Harris’s credit, things could have fallen apart when Biden abruptly stepped aside. Instead, Harris quickly clinched the nomination and had a strong first few weeks, erasing the deficit Biden had given her. The Democratic convention was a success, as was her acceptance speech. Her performance at the September 10th debate with Donald Trump was first-rate.
Harris’ Achilles heel is she’s now making promises she could have made and implemented while VP, making immigration and the economy Harris’ liabilities, especially since she’s been sitting next to Biden, watching the US turn into the circus it has become. These liabilities, basically her only liabilities, negate her stance on abortion, democracy, healthcare, a long-winning issue for Democrats, and Trump’s character. All Harris has offered voters is “feel-good vibes” over substance. In contrast, Trump offers the tangible political tornado (read: steamroll the problems Americans are facing) many Americans seek. With Trump, there’s no doubt that change, admittedly in a messy fashion, will happen. If enough Americans believe the changes he’ll implement will benefit them and their country…
The case against Harris on immigration, at a time when there’s a huge global backlash to immigration, even as the American news media are pointing out, in famously immigrant-friendly Canada, is relatively straightforward: During the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, illegal Southern border crossings increased significantly.
The words illegal immigration, to put it mildly, irks most Americans. On the legal immigration front, according to Forbes, most billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name three, have immigrants as CEOs. Immigrants, with tech skills and an entrepreneurial thirst, have kept America leading the world. I like to think that Americans and Canadians understand the best immigration policy is to strategically let enough of these immigrants in who’ll increase GDP and tax base and not rely on social programs. In other words, Americans and Canadians, and arguably citizens of European countries, expect their governments to be more strategic about immigration.
The days of the words on a bronze plaque mounted inside the Statue of Liberty pedestal’s lower level, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” are no longer tolerated. Americans only want immigrants who’ll benefit America.
Does Trump demagogue the immigration issue with xenophobic and racist tropes, many of which are outright lies, such as claiming Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets? Absolutely. However, such unhinged talk signals to Americans who are worried about the steady influx of illegal immigrants into their country that Trump can handle immigration so that it’s beneficial to the country as opposed to being an issue of economic stress.
In many ways, if polls are to be believed, Harris is paying the price for Biden and her lax policies early in their term. Yes, stimulus spending quickly rebuilt the job market, but at the cost of higher inflation. Loosen border policies at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was increasing was a gross miscalculation, much like Trudeau’s immigration quota increase, and Biden indulging himself in running for re-election should never have happened.
If Trump wins, Democrats will proclaim that everyone is sexist, racist and misogynous, not to mention a likely White Supremacist, and for good measure, they’ll beat the “voter suppression” button. If Harris wins, Trump supporters will repeat voter fraud—since July, Elon Musk has tweeted on Twitter at least 22 times about voters being “imported” from abroad—being widespread.
Regardless of who wins tomorrow, Americans need to cool down; and give the divisive rhetoric a long overdue break. The right to an opinion belongs to everyone. Someone whose opinion differs from yours is not by default sexist, racist, a fascist or anything else; they simply disagree with you. Americans adopting the respectful mindset to agree to disagree would be the best thing they could do for the United States of America.
PHOENIX (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent proponent of debunked public health claims whom Donald Trump has promised to put in charge of health initiatives, said Saturday that Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected president.
Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.
Kennedy made the declaration Saturday on the social media platform X alongside a variety of claims about the heath effects of fluoride.
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy wrote. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “want to Make America Healthy Again,” he added, repeating a phrase Trump often uses and links to Kennedy.
Trump told NBC News on Sunday that he had not spoken to Kennedy about fluoride yet, “but it sounds OK to me. You know it’s possible.”
The former president declined to say whether he would seek a Cabinet role for Kennedy, a job that would require Senate confirmation, but added, “He’s going to have a big role in the administration.”
Asked whether banning certain vaccines would be on the table, Trump said he would talk to Kennedy and others about that. Trump described Kennedy as “a very talented guy and has strong views.”
The sudden and unexpected weekend social media post evoked the chaotic policymaking that defined Trump’s White House tenure, when he would issue policy declarations on Twitter at virtually all hours. It also underscored the concerns many experts have about Kennedy, who has long promoted debunked theories about vaccine safety, having influence over U.S. public health.
In 1950, federal officials endorsed water fluoridation to prevent tooth decay, and continued to promote it even after fluoride toothpaste brands hit the market several years later. Though fluoride can come from a number of sources, drinking water is the main source for Americans, researchers say.
Officials lowered their recommendation for drinking water fluoride levels in 2015 to address a tooth condition called fluorosis, that can cause splotches on teeth and was becoming more common in U.S. kids.
In August, a federal agency determined “with moderate confidence” that there is a link between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in kids. The National Toxicology Program based its conclusion on studies involving fluoride levels at about twice the recommended limit for drinking water.
A federal judge later cited that study in ordering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen cautioned that it’s not certain that the amount of fluoride typically added to water is causing lower IQ in kids, but he concluded that mounting research points to an unreasonable risk that it could be. He ordered the EPA to take steps to lower that risk, but didn’t say what those measures should be.
In his X post Saturday, Kennedy tagged Michael Connett, the lead attorney representing the plaintiff in that lawsuit, the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization has a lawsuit pending against news organizations including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy is on leave from the group but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
What role Kennedy might hold if Trump wins on Tuesday remains unclear. Kennedy recently told NewsNation that Trump asked him to “reorganize” agencies including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and some agencies under the Department of Agriculture.
But for now, the former independent presidential candidate has become one of Trump’s top surrogates. Trump frequently mentions having the support of Kennedy, a scion of a Democratic dynasty and the son of former Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy traveled with Trump Friday and spoke at his rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump said Saturday that he told Kennedy: “You can work on food, you can work on anything you want” except oil policy.
“He wants health, he wants women’s health, he wants men’s health, he wants kids, he wants everything,” Trump added.
