![go hard or go home meme go hard or go home meme](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAQYJht45Kg/maxresdefault.jpg)
In her surveys of college students and breast cancer patients, people who choose media for stress management reported it as an effective way to cope. For example, my collaborator Robin Nabi has found in previous work that using media – whether television, books or social media – is one of the top strategies for managing stress. This work adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that people use media to help them deal with stress.
![go hard or go home meme go hard or go home meme](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/03/03/overly_custom-39399d2cf8b6395770e3f10fd45b22ce39df70d4.jpg)
It’s possible that exerting more effort thinking about the topic could lead to mentally rehearsing ways to cope with the related stress, instead of avoiding it entirely. Those who saw COVID-19-related memes also reported thinking more deeply about the memes and their meaning – what media psychologists call “ information processing.” More information processing was related to more confidence in their abilities to handle pandemic-related stress.
![go hard or go home meme go hard or go home meme](http://images2.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED40/51d3268c0cc27.jpeg)
People who viewed memes about COVID-19 rated themselves as less stressed about life during a global pandemic. There seems to be value in reframing something that is constantly stressful and scary into a more approachable topic by using humor. Moreover, we found that participants who rated themselves higher on the positive emotion scale were also more likely to feel confident in their ability to handle the stress associated with living through a global pandemic. In short, viewing a few cute or funny memes – regardless of their topic – provided a quick boost of positive emotion for many people. For instance, people who saw memes scored, on average, a 4.71 on our positive emotions scale, compared with an average of 3.85 for those who did not see a meme. People who viewed just three memes rated themselves on a 1-7 scale as calmer, more content and more amused compared with people who didn’t see the memes. We asked particularly about how they felt about COVID-19 and their ability to cope with pandemic stress. Then, no matter which set of content our participants saw, everyone next answered questions about how they felt in that moment. A third group saw image-free plain text that summarized the general idea of the memes, but was not in the least bit funny. One group saw the COVID-19 memes, while a second group saw the memes not about COVID-19.
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Go hard or go home meme series#
In our main study, we recruited nearly 800 participants to view a series of images using online survey software. Using that data, we developed two pools of memes using the same images: One set had captions about COVID-19 and another set had captions unrelated to COVID-19. We asked participants to rate them for how funny and cute they were, as well as how authentic they seemed as popular internet memes. The first step in our research was combing through hundreds of real memes we found in the wild on social media. I partnered with colleagues Robin Nabi and Nicholas Eng to investigate the potential effect of mini meme-breaks on people’s pandemic stress and emotions. Popular internet memes often develop their own names, such as “ Distracted Boyfriend,” “ Squinting Woman” and “ Handshakes.” They have existed since long before the birth of the internet, but digital technology adds new dimensions, given the ease of creating, editing and sharing memes online. Memes are little units of culture that spread from one person to the next.