Best Paper Award at the International Society of Communication (ICA) 2024 (right: Professor Yoo Woo-hyun of the Department of Media Communication)

Incheon National University (President Park Jong-tae) announced that Yoo Woo-hyun, a professor of media communication, won the Top Paper Award in the division of the Korean American Communication Association at the 74th International Communication Association regular academic conference held in Gold Coast, Australia, from June 20 (Thursday) to 24 (Monday).

The paper, titled "Impact of Disaster-Related Social Media Content on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," verified whether photos and videos of the disaster spread through social media during the October 29 disaster in Itaewon, Seoul, in 2022 caused post-traumatic stress disorder of social media users. As a result of the study, it was found that photos and videos of the disaster site without filtration directly caused post-traumatic stress disorder while also causing post-traumatic stress disorder through user anger emotions.

Professor Yoo said, "The study empirically verified how the on-site photos and videos distributed indiscriminately through social media in the early days of the October 29 Itaewon disaster adversely affected the public's mental health, and reaffirmed the importance of mutual cooperation and communication among the government, the media, social media channels, and media users in the event of similar disasters in the future." 

Meanwhile, more than 1,800 papers were published at this conference by 3,000 media communication scholars from about 70 countries around the world under the theme of "Communication and Global Human Rights."