Thanks Renzo

Hello,

I believe that you want to study fear responses. Many people are interested in "panic," but panic is a very unusual response, especially related to news reports. People are always afraid that bad news will cause people to panic, but that just does not happen. (See Peter Sandman's discussion about "panic panic.")

To study fear responses, I might recommend that you look at the Risk Behavior Diagnosis Scale (Witte, K., Meyer, G., & Martell, D. (2001). Effective health risk messages: A step-by-step guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.). You can use it to measure whether the respondents are responding to a threat by controlling their fear or acting to respond to the threat. Quite a few studies have used this approach.

Hope this information helps!

Thanks Steven, I want to study the fear developed by Media news in general public on several health issues.

Maybe it would be worth to consider some health anxiety scales like the Illness Attitude Scale (IAS) or the Survey of Health Concerns (SHC). I think this questionnaires are suitable, especially, if you focus on the influence of the presentation or frequency of health topics on the individual level of illness or health anxiety. I would avoid the term “psychosis” like Renzo Bianchi has already written; one reason is that the heightened or triggered fear is not psychotic like. Further, I guess the term "cyberchondria" will be helpful for your search.

In our project, which focus on online-health-information the following articles were essential:

Baumgartner, S.E., & Hartmann, T. (2011). The role of health anxiety in online health information search. Cyberpsychology. Behavior and Social Networking, 14(10), 613–618. doi:10.1089/cyber.2010.0425.

Muse, K., McManus, F., Leung, C., Meghreblian, B., & Williams, J.M.G. (2012). Cyberchondriasis: Fact or fiction? A preliminary examination of the relationship between health anxiety and searching for health information on the Internet. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 26(1), 189-196. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2011.11.005

White R.W., & Horvitz, E. (2009). Cyberchondria: Studies of the escalation of medical concerns in web search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 27, 1–37.

I hope this information will be helpful for you

Thanks Sandra for valuable suggestions.

Dear Adityaji: Greetings. I do feel this is the best way to study the heat of the market. the media hype or fear both provides inside out. some time this fear is enormous that the bulk voting, swing of the votes moves from this part to that. we do find the similar in kashmir and probably will be in the Bihar Election. we can measure it through some known parameters like people exposed to particular segment of media like print, electronic or both with non exposed. Especially in the Bastar or interior areas there is absolute no impact on Media fear. we can compare these two also.  Now we do have various medias comparison social media vs Electronic media etc. Good to find you over RG. i do hope we will definitely cite you in our papers too. with good wishes. Prof. Abhay

Thank you very much sir