The information conveyed, during attacks, by social networks stressful young adults, who have difficulty regulating their emotions.
The telephones start to vibrate, resounding alerts from news sites which are linked and multiply, the titles at the beginning cautious become disastrous … We must face the evidence, an attack has struck again. London on Saturday June 3 at around 10 p.m. is the latest city to have been affected by this long series of dramas which have grieved the world for several years.
With all these atrocities, what could be more natural than turning to social networks, to express solidarity, empathy, anger or even follow the unfolding of events? The hashtag #PrayForManchester had already been used more than 60,000 times on Twitter less than 24 hours after the suicide bombing that claimed the lives of 22 people, including many children, days before the London bombing.
Social networks promote the development of anxiety
However, this “emotional contagion” is not without consequences, more particularly on the psyche of the youngest, affirm Emmanuel Monfort, lecturer in psychology at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, and Mohammad H. Afzli, post-doctoral researcher. at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal, in a long column published on the site The Conversation.
“It seems already proven that social networks promote the development of anxiety in crisis situations, due to a process of emotional contagion, that is to say a transfer to other individuals of his own emotional state ”, thus explain the scientists. According to them, this process could be linked to the way in which individuals regulate their emotions: “This way of adapting is in fact associated with social influences, those at the heart of social networks. “
A month after the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris and Saint-Denis, these two researchers interviewed a sample of 451 young adults on the time they had spent searching for information on the media, both traditional (television , radio, newspapers) and digital (websites, social networks), on the strategies used to cope with the emotions they feel and on the possible symptoms they may be suffering from.
“It’s about staying vigilant”
The results obtained clearly go in the direction of an “emotional contagion among the biggest consumers of social networks in the month which followed the attacks”, they indicate. “The more time the individuals who responded to our survey spent on these networks, the more they manifested a significant level of anxiety and depression (but not post-traumatic stress), when at the same time they had recourse to so-called dysfunctional emotional regulation strategies (for example, keeping one’s feelings buried, or even offloading oneself verbally onto others) ”, explain the two scientists in their forum. An association which, on the other hand, was not true for the time spent watching information on the attacks on television, listening to the radio, consulting websites or the paper press.
The information conveyed by social networks does not seem to constitute in itself a trauma, “but rather a stressor which acts on the mood of young adults who have difficulty in regulating their emotions”, they analyze.
While it is obvious that social networks can constitute extremely effective tools for disseminating warning or solidarity messages and therefore for protecting as many people as possible in crisis situations, “the fact remains that It is about remaining vigilant to the different ways in which these new tools are used in crisis situations and in particular following mass attacks ”, they conclude.
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