GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY AFTER RECEIVING THE NEWS FROM THE MASS MEDIA

Abstract

The article is dealt with the problem of changes in the experiencing psychological safety by students of different sexes as a result of contact with the media. The aim of the article is to identify gender differences in the students’ experience of psychological safety after perceiving the news from the media, depending on the individual and typological properties and basic beliefs of students of both sexes. Methods such as the author's express questionnaire, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory by Charles Spielberger, the Individual and Typological Questionnaire by L. Sobchyk and the Basic Personality Beliefs Scale were used. The results show that women are more likely to experience a sense of danger after receiving the news from the media than men. For students of both sexes, the main sources of news are their closest environment (family, friends and classmates) and media such as the Internet and television. At the same time, women are more likely to receive news reports on television and have more trust in the media as a source of information than men. Psychological safety disorders after receiving news from the media usually occur among the men who have an increased level of personal anxiety and women who respond to news by increasing situational anxiety and who have higher figures on such individual and typological characteristics as anxiety, sensitivity, rigidity and lower figures on such basic beliefs as justice and luck. The main findings of the study are that the perception of news from the media causes a psychological response among students of both sexes. It is expressed in the decreasing of their psychological safety sense, but women identify themselves with situations shown in the news more intensely than men do. A certain composition of women’s personality only intensifies the decrease in their sense of psychological safety, because even before watching the news such women are more susceptible to external influences and have lower internal resources to resist them.