5. Discussion
depressed
EVENTS, DISEASE
In summary, our findings indicate that the more often older adults consumed media and the more closely they followed COVID-19 news, the more they felt unhappy and depressed. This is largely in line with past studies, suggesting the detrimental impact of general media consumption on mental health. Importantly, we found that positive news evokes significantly stronger reactions than negative news in older adults. In particular, older adults appeared to have a strong positivity bias for COVID-19 news—positive news had a greater impact on older adults than negative news. A similar study investigated the age difference in preferences for fear-enhancing and fear-reducing news in a disease outbreak [Our results provide insights into the mindset and outlook on life of older adults. This increased knowledge and understanding of older adults’ positive outlook are important and can be used to our advantage in different areas to possibly reframe how society attempts to improve the mental well-being of older adults during stressful periods by allowing others, e.g., family members and caretakers, to help them more effectively. For example, due to the presence of a positivity bias, it might be beneficial to include more positive news in the media on TV networks, such as Another possibility is to create special programs that focus on a subset of the news—positive news—for individuals living in separate communities, either orally, online, or in print. Social service agencies can connect with a news studio to present special programs at night or during the day that are specifically targeted to older adults and focus on positive news only. Special news magazines that present only positive news can also be created, and such publications are currently available in schools for students of all ages. These publications could be given a wider circulation. Other ideas include developing and broadcasting special radio shows and podcasts. All these special programs and efforts do not suggest that negative news cannot be shared; rather, it suggests that the news can be structured in such a way that it brings out the positive aspects and is not perceived as negative.These efforts to reframe the news are critical, as having a positivity bias may be a coping mechanism for older adults in the context of the pandemic. This may be similar to how people’s recollections of the past are often positively biased as a healthy coping mechanism, resulting in people perceiving events in their lives to often be more pleasant than unpleasant [One limitation of our study is that we did not include younger adults as a comparison group. Thus, it is not definitive if the positivity bias is, in fact, due to the age-related positivity effect, or if the positivity bias toward COVID-19 news also applies to younger adults. However, in line with the socio-emotional selectivity theory [Another possible limitation is that our study was conducted online via Google Forms. We did not print the forms on a hard copy and distribute them to those who do not use internet. Thus, we might have excluded older adults who do not have access to the internet, leading to a skewed representation of the older adults in the USA. However, according to the Pew Research Center [In this study we focused on traditional media and did not include social media. Recent statistics published by Statista Research Department [It is imperative to mention that we had uneven representation of males and females in the two conditions. Although we employed a random assignment for the experimental conditions, the positive news condition had 18 males and 17 females, while the negative news condition had 13 males and 21 females. Similarly, 44.4% of participants in the positive news condition group had an income of USD 160 k+, compared with 17.6% of participants in the negative news condition. However, we did not find any significant differences in male/female participants or the income level between the two conditions. This indicates that, even though the raw numbers are not equal, they are not statistically different. We also ran Chi-square tests using Fisher’s exact test, and no significant difference was found: χ2 = 1.21; We also note that our sample was recruited from communities with high Asian populations. This suggests that our results should be interpreted with caution and may not be generalized to populations of other ethnicities. Some studies showed there is no correlation between ethnicity (White, Latinx, and Asian American) and negativity bias [Finally, we only examined self-reports of emotional outcomes from positive and negative COVID-19 news. The Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM; [