Alina Maria LESCAI, Alexandru Bogdan CIUBARA, Stefan Lucian BURLEA, Gabriela BALAN

Abstract

How is the dependency spiral triggered? It might start by looking either for pleasure or escape. In either case, the time spent in front of a screen leads to a pleasant, dopamine-mediated experience. The desire to repeat the use is further fuelled by the physiological process of tolerance and addiction. This is how things unfold in screen dependence (mass-media) when socialization, games, movies are concerned. Things look entirely different when the need for information is taken into consideration. What is the need for information’s threshold? Information is not the same thing as the learning process. The fourth power in the state is the MEDIA. In mass-media, information relies on amazement, emotional shock, fear. Media feeds on powerful emotions. Are we all victims of such emotions? As of December 2019, until the present, mass-media information focused on the medical and social issue of the coronavirus pandemics. How have we been affected by this information? What was its impact on our anxiety? How was the perception on reality of the people who had the disease altered? In order to get a few answers, we applied a series of questionnaires to a batch of 30 people who had the SARS COV2 infection and to a batch of 20 people who haven’t yet contracted the virus.

Used material:

- Coronavirus anxiety questionnaire www.researchcentral.ro

- Mass-media dependency questionnaire www.researchcentral.ro

- SRGS posttraumatic development scale; Crystal Park, Lawrence Cohen and Renee Murch

The summarized data indicates that the people from the batch who was infected with cu SARS COV2 have a high anxiety level, a minimum level of mass-media dependency and a maximum SRGS level. In the batch of people who have not contracted the disease, the majority has a medium towards maximum anxiety level, minimum mass-media dependency. The people in both batches unanimously asserted they felt oversaturated with the media information, although a year ago they could have declared themselves as addicted to such type of information. Considering that the questioned people suffered minimum manifestation forms of the disease, the high scores obtained in SRGS could only be justified if this disease were correlated to a major psychic disease.
Keywords

mass-media, anxiety, trauma, virus