REPRESENTATION OF ANXIETY STATES IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article examines verbal and non-verbal means of representing anxiety states in contemporary English-language mass media discourse. The research material consists of excerpts from articles describing anxiety states, selected through continuous sampling from the 2025 issues of the weekly American online magazine Newsweek. The results of the study indicate that the primary lexical marker of anxiety in the English language is the noun “anxiety,” which combines with various prepositional modifiers to form a wide range of terms that specify not only the type of anxiety (social, separation, postpartum, climate, flight, gift, etc.) but also the context of its occurrence. Phrases such as “social anxiety”, “separation anxiety”, “postpartum anxiety”, “climate anxiety”, and others reveal the sources, time frames, and sociocultural features of psychoemotional discomfort. The analysis of illustrative fragments has revealed that in mass media discourse, anxiety is described through metaphors and epithets that enhance expressiveness and help convey the complexity of subjective experiences. The use of discourse markers, accumulation, and syntactic constructions that imitate “breathless speech” contributes to reproducing the dynamics of anxiety and panic states, creating in the reader a sense of emotional involvement. A special place in the representation of anxiety is occupied by descriptions of physiological manifestations – such as heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, and sweating – which emphasize the multifaceted nature of this emotional state. In addition, political, economic, and social factors have been identified, including rising prices, unemployment, loneliness, and global crises. These factors deepen generalized anxiety disorder and negatively affect the psychological atmosphere of society. Thus, in contemporary English-language mass media discourse, the concept of anxiety transforms into a multifaceted sociocultural phenomenon, with various contextual layers that reflect current social challenges and the particularities of the culture of self-expression. A promising direction for further research is conducting a multimodal analysis of social media video content to identify correlations between verbal markers of anxiety and users’ non-verbal expressions.