A funny meme a day may keep the psychiatrist away, a new study suggests.
Humorous memes help people to cope better with stress and stay calmer during the Covid-19 pandemic, the US researchers found.
The viewers of funny memes feel calmer and more content and confident about coping under the pandemic, according to research among nearly 750 online participants, published on Monday in the journal Psychology of Popular Media.
Lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, a media studies professor at Pennsylvania State University, was fascinated by how people “were using social media, and memes in particular, as a way to think about the pandemic”, prompting an online survey on the topic in December.
The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer.
— Study
“We found that viewing just three memes can help people cope with the stress of living during a global pandemic,” she reported.
The researchers looked at how memes influenced positive emotions, anxiety, information processing and coping, also probing deeper into how different content, subjects and levels of cuteness affected participants.
“(The study) found that people who viewed memes compared with other types of media reported higher levels of humour and more positive emotions, which was indirectly related to a decrease in stress about the Covid-19 pandemic,” the team reported.
People who viewed memes with Covid-19-related captions reported lower stress levels than those who viewed memes without Covid-19-related captions. For example, one meme featured a picture of an angry cat with a Covid-19-related caption that said: “New study confirms: Cats can’t spread Covid-19 but would if given option”, while the non-Covid-19-related version of the same meme was captioned: “New study confirms: Cats can’t sabotage your car but would if given option”.
Those who viewed the Covid-19-related content reported feeling more confident in coping with the pandemic.
“People who viewed cute memes featuring human or animal babies were less likely to think about the pandemic and process how it affected their lives, even when the memes’ captions were about Covid-19,” the team found.
The average age of the participants was 41,8, in a range from 18 to 88 years old, and the majority were white (72%) women (55%) without a college degree (64%).
The memes selected were graded as equally funny and cute, out of hundreds of popular memes from websites such as Imgur and IMGflip. Young animals and humans were considered cuter.
Participants reported how often in the past month they felt nervous or stressed and were randomly assigned to view three memes with the same type of subject (animal or human), cuteness level (adult or baby) and caption content (Covid-19-related or non-Covid-19-related), with content containing no images and plain text as controls.
A specialist in media psychology, Myrick said: “While the World Health Organisation recommended that people avoid too much Covid-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about Covid-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic.
“This suggests that not all media are uniformly bad for mental health and people should stop and take stock of what type of media they are consuming.”
Public health and government agencies using memes as a cheap, accessible way to communicate about stressful events could benefit from their use, but should avoid overly cute options, she said.
“The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer and therefore better able to pay attention to the underlying messages related to health threats,” Myrick said.
Taiwan, which did well early in the pandemic at containing the coronavirus, used humour to educate the public and fight fake news.
Even the Taiwanese premier featured in this “humor over rumor” approach, for example, in a cartoon featuring his rear end with the caption: “We have only one pair of buttocks” — intended to limit the panic buying of toilet paper. A friendly dog called Zongchai also featured as a mascot in coronavirus prevention campaigns.
SA doesn’t have a matching mascot, but the public has made up for this with the country’s brand of gallows humour, popular in the memes and TikTok videos that go viral. The elections may have displaced Covid-19 as this month’s star, but the virus jokes will be back. Watch out for the summer collection.
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