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McLaughlin, Gotlieb, and Mills introduced the concept of problematic news consumption (PNC) in their 2023 study, finding that those classified as having severely problematic news consumption (16.5% of the sample) exhibited significantly greater levels of mental and physical ill-being. These results were the product of a single cross-sectional survey, however. Using a two-wave longitudinal survey, we sought to replicate their findings. In the current study, we found support for the factor structure of the PNC scale and the 4-profile solution, although the severely problematic news consumption profile represented a substantially smaller portion of the sample (7.5%) than in the initial study. Additionally, we found support for greater levels of mental and physical ill-being among those in the severely problematic news consumption profile in the Wave 1 cross-sectional model. However, while we found greater levels of mental ill-being among these participants in the autoregressive model, we did not find greater levels of physical ill-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adds to the growing body of literature on problematic media behavior by introducing and explicating the concept of problematic news consumption, which we define as involving transportation, preoccupation, misregulation, underregulation, and interference. Using survey data from a national sample of U.S. adults, we examine the factor structure of a problematic news consumption measure, the existence of latent classes derived from the expected factors, and differences in mental and physical health across the emerging classes. Results show support for the proposed factor structure as well as the existence of four latent classes, which appear to be stratified according to severity of problematic news consumption. Results also show greater mental and physical ill-being among those with higher levels of problematic news consumption compared to those with lower levels, even after controlling for demographics, personality traits, and overall news use. Implications for designing effective media literacy campaigns to raise awareness of the potential for news consumption to develop into a problematic behavior as well as the development of intervention strategies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of online support groups has led to an expression effects paradigm within the health communication literature. Although religious support expression is characterized as a typical subdimension of emotional support, we argue that in the context of a life-threatening illness, the inclusion of a religious component creates a unique communication process. Using data from an online group for women with breast cancer, we test a theoretical expression effects model. Results demonstrate that for breast cancer patients, religious support expression has distinct effects from general emotional support messages, which highlights the need to further theorize expression effects along these lines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]