 Teaching emotional mindfulness to fight the spread of misinformation. One of the reasons that COVID-19 misinformation spreads is because it is designed to be shocking or scary and to provoke the reader into engaging. Intense emotions like fear or anger can cause us to react impulsively. So when we see posts about COVID-19 that make us feel angry or afraid, we are more likely to react by commenting or sharing that information without pausing to consider the source or verify if that information is true. So what can we do about it? Some research suggests that emotional mindfulness can change how people react to online misinformation. When we slow down and pay attention to the way that our actions are being driven by our feelings, we often make better decisions about how to respond as a result. Knowing this, our research team designed and tested a learning intervention with the goal of teaching emotional mindfulness. We created an educational comic that was shared with 295 adult women in Canada and the US, and we asked them to complete a survey about it. Our results showed that our educational comic can help to teach emotional mindfulness in the face of misinformation. Nearly 87% of respondents were able to correctly identify that strong emotions like anger and fear drive the spread of misinformation. 79% also said that they will likely use the suggestion to pause and check in with their emotions before reacting to online information. However, our results also show that 20% of respondents would probably ignore the comic if they saw it on their social media feeds. Together, these findings showcase the importance of designing learning interventions that are both effective and engaging. No matter how effective our learning intervention is at teaching emotional mindfulness, it can't accomplish that goal if it's not engaging enough to capture attention online. While a comic can be an effective teaching tool, it still has to compete with everything else that people see online, like cat videos, TikTok dances, and funny memes. Future research should explore how to make learning interventions like ours more effective, more engaging, and more relatable to people. Perhaps providing the same information in a more immersive format, like a video or game, would be more attractive. Thanks for watching. You can find more details about this study in the article linked in the video description. And if you liked this, please share it with your friends.