Meme consumption during the COVID pandemic: the influence of memes and meme types on COVID-related stress and coping effects.
Myrick, JG, Nabi, RL, & Eng, NJ (2021) Meme consumption during the COVID pandemic: the impact of memes and meme types on COVID-related stress and coping effects. Popular Media Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000371
Commentary
With the COVID-19 pandemic, social media memes (i.e., humorous and cute images associated with popular culture) have also spread throughout the Internet.
A between-subjects online experiment was conducted (N= 748) to assess how viewing memes in this pandemic era affects viewers' stress and coping. In terms of psychological responses, meme viewing was shown to be associated with stronger cuteness responses, higher levels of reported humor, more positive emotions, and lower levels of information processing, but meme viewing was not associated with state anxiety, COVID-19-related stress, COVID-19-related coping effects, but it was not associated with state anxiety, COVID-19-related stress, or COVID-19-related coping.
Furthermore, because memes generated positive emotions, which were associated with increased COVID-19 coping effects, path analysis revealed that meme display indirectly increased COVID-19 coping effects compared to non-meme content.
In terms of the effect of meme type, memes featuring animals were rated as cuter than memes featuring humans, and were predicted to have lower information processing and coping effects than human memes, and were rated as such.
The cuteness response was associated with lower coping effectiveness. In contrast, captioning of memes related to COVID-19 was associated with deeper information processing and lower levels of COVID-19-related stress than captioning not related to COVID-19.
Information processing is associated with increased coping effectiveness, indicating that memes, especially those associated with highly stressful situations, may help support efforts to cope with stressors.
