Bad news travel fast. And it travels much faster in our modern, ever-connected world. So much so, according to psychologist and professor Mary McNaughton-Cassill of the University of Texas at San Antonio, that exposure to that deluge of bad news could be affecting people’s general outlook of the world.
"Media has changed our whole view of the world, and we’ve gone from people who struggled to get enough information to people who are flooded constantly," said McNaughton-Cassill.
Flooded not only with news, but entertainment, and social media notifications. McNaughton-Cassill said a survey of her own students showed less than one waking hour a day was spent "disconnected" from media, a trend she said outlets are well aware of, leading them to tailor their coverage to feed media-hungry consumers.
Not only do media outlets want to be the first to report, said McNaughton-Cassill, they are also playing upon a basic human need of knowing about threats in order to protect oneself. And the result of all of the negative news is severe stress in many Americans.
"Things that catch our attention are stressful events that affect lots of people, and are unpredictable, and unfamiliar and therefore have a real scary impact," she said.
The impact of knowing about all of these scary events is a low-level kind of anxiety that feeds into the notion that the world is getting worse, when ironically things may in fact be getting better, according to McNaughton-Cassill.
Although she acknowledges that this type of stress may be low on the mental illness spectrum, it is affecting people’s choices, she said.
"When I talk to young people a lot of them say, 'After watching a lot of news, my decision is that everyone in politics is corrupt so I’m just not going to vote,'" she said.
