4. Results
depressed
Preliminary analyses using a multivariate ANOVA revealed no significant effects of age, education, living status, and household income on GHQ and positive response scores (First, in order to understand how much of an impact media consumption had on the participants’ mental health, we ran two-tailed correlational analyses on three key variables: how much older adults consumed media, how closely they followed COVID-19 news, and their GHQ-12 items. The analyses revealed that media consumption and following COVID-19 news have no significant relationships with the overall mental well-being of the older adults (GHQ score). Instead, we found that, specifically, the more often older adults consumed media and the more they closely followed COVID-19 news, the more they felt worse (being unhappy and depressed, Q9 and Q11 respectively), Next, to determine whether positive and negative COVID-19 news have similar or different effects on older adults’ emotional responses and wellbeing, we ran a multivariate ANOVA with the condition as the independent variable, and the positive response scores and GHQ as the dependent variables. We found there was a significant condition effect on the positive response scores, 