The Effects Of Media On Implicit Attitude Towards Suicide Of College Students

In many factors influencing suicide, the media story on suicide is one of the most important reasons which induce many vulnerable people chose suicide. The Werther effect was used by Phillips to represent the media's impact on suicide.In considering whether young people would be more likely to accept suicide than adults, special attention should be paid to media's impact on suicide attitude. The reason is that the suicide proportion of young people who take more tolerant attitude towards suicide is higher. According to the research result that social cognition is more implicit, whether suicide attitude as a kind of social attitude includes dissociated implicit attitude and explicit attitude. And that whether the media story on suicide has different effect on implicit and explicit attitude.The impact of suicide reports from Internet on college students' implicit attitude and explicit attitude toward suicide is investigated in this study. Furthermore it is analyzed that whether life events and the extent of usual contacting with suicide reports would mediate the impact. The main results are as following:(1) Most students were exposed to unreasonable suicide reports, mainly through the Internet, followed by television. Female students may be more concerned about suicide reports than male students.(2) College students take more negative attitude towards suicide and more positive attitude towards life.(3) Suicide attitude includes dissociated implicit attitude and explicit attitude.(4) Life events and the extent of usual contacting with suicide reports do not mediate the impact of suicide reports.(5) The higher the stress of negative life events the college students have, the more positive and tolerant explicit attitude towards suicide they will take.(6) Suicide reports mainly impact female college students' implicit attitude towards suicide by strengthening the association between death and positive feeling and the association between life and negative feeling.(7) Media reports mainly have short-time influence on implicit attitude towards suicide and the impact of life events on explicit suicide attitude is briefly long-time.