Hide the pain, Harold — study shows memes help ease pandemic stress
Go ahead, enjoy your memes
A meme experiment
The first step inour researchwas combing through hundreds of real memes we found in the wild on social media. We asked participants to rate them for how funny and cute they were, as well as how authentic they seemed as popular internet memes.
Using that data, we developed two pools of memes using the same images: One set had captions about COVID-19 and another set had captions unrelated to COVID-19.
In our main study, we recruited nearly 800 participants to view a series of images using online survey software. One group saw the COVID-19 memes, while a second group saw the memes not about COVID-19. A third group saw image-free plain text that summarized the general idea of the memes, but was not in the least bit funny.
Then, no matter which set of content our participants saw, everyone next answered questions about how they felt in that moment. We asked particularly about how they felt about COVID-19 and their ability to cope with pandemic stress.
Memes as mood boosters
People who viewed just three memes rated themselves on a 1-7 scale as calmer, more content and more amused compared with people who didn’t see the memes. For instance, people who saw memes scored, on average, a 4.71 on our positive emotions scale, compared with an average of 3.85 for those who did not see a meme. In short, viewing a few cute or funny memes – regardless of their topic – provided a quick boost of positive emotion for many people.
Moreover, we found that participants who rated themselves higher on the positive emotion scale were also more likely to feel confident in their ability to handle the stress associated with living through a global pandemic. There seems to be value in reframing something that is constantly stressful and scary into a more approachable topic by using humor.
The topic of the memes mattered. People who viewed memes about COVID-19 rated themselves as less stressed about life during a global pandemic. Those who saw COVID-19-related memes also reported thinking more deeply about the memes and their meaning – what media psychologists call “information processing.” More information processing was related to more confidence in their abilities to handle pandemic-related stress. It’s possible that exerting more effort thinking about the topic could lead tomentally rehearsing ways to copewith the related stress, instead of avoiding it entirely.
This work adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that people use media to help them deal with stress. For example, my collaborator Robin Nabi has foundin previous workthat using media – whether television, books or social media – is one of the top strategies for managing stress. In her surveys of college students and breast cancer patients, people who choose media for stress management reported it as an effective way to cope.
Credit:Instagram/mytherapistsays
Together, these studies suggest that media use is not alwaysthe stress-inducing experienceorwaste of timethat it is sometimes portrayed to be. Instead, it likely depends on the specific type of media message you are consuming, the type of person you are and the situation in which you are consuming it.
The pandemic, with its accompanying restrictions on travel, work and socializing, has beenan uncommonly stressful time. Taking a break to view and share bits of cute or funny pop culture commentary in the form of COVID-19-related memes can be a quick and easy way to connect with others and address pandemic stress head on through laughter.
Article byJessica Myrick, Professor of Media Studies,Penn State
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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