The paradox of informational regulation of anxiety during the war in Ukraine: An infodemiological test of phantom anxiety theory.

Abstract

This article develops phantom anxiety theory (PAT), according to which the human anxiety system includes not only responses to current or anticipated threats, but also a tonic, endogenous component of vigilance. PAT leads to a counterintuitive prediction: a decrease in the level of real environmental threats does not necessarily produce a proportional decrease in anxiety, and relative interest in the category of anxiety may be greater where threat is more indirect, informational, and anticipated than where it is direct and tangible.This prediction was tested by using Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, as a natural quasi-experiment. Google Trends data were treated as an indicator of collective attention and labeling practices. After the invasion, there was a strong nationwide increase in interest in Topic “Anxiety” and a rapid reorganization of the front–rear gradient: the largest relative increase occurred in regions farther from military operations rather than in those most directly threatened (TV ≈ 0.25; ρ ≈ −0.54). This pattern emerged immediately after the invasion, persisted across subsequent time windows, and was not observed for numerous control and comparison topics. The findings suggest that a purely reactive model of anxiety does not fully capture the operating principles of the human anxiety system. Alarm arousal may persist despite objective safety and only secondarily organize itself around available objects, helping to explain why a reduction in real threats does not necessarily lead to a proportional decrease in anxiety.