Basic information
Investigator: doc. PhDr. Ladislav Kesner
Main recipient: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Research period: 1/1/2020 – 31/12/2022
Total budget: 6,740,000 CZK
Supported by: Czech Science Foundation (GACR)
Annotation
It has been long recognized that media news are capable of generating and exacerbating stress, anxiety, depression and other negative mental states. However, it is not well understood how exposure to a broad range of media news, from affectively highly salient to mundane, impacts mental states and mental health of news consumers. In particular, there are huge gaps in understanding the psychological and neuronal mechanisms, through which perception and assimilation of media news affect mental states of perceivers. The project has three, mutually linked objectives of high relevance for today’s information society surrounded by media: (i) to establish the connection of psychological traits and states with use of media and political orientation on a population-scale level, (ii) to explore the connection of psychological traits and states with subjective, behavioral and neural responses to media representations of highly salient news topics, and (iii) to determine the effect of two different cognitive assimilation strategies (reframing and rumination) on neural and behavioral processes.