The Bulletin of National Defence University of Ukraine

In the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, news content shapes emotions and behaviour, making it especially important to study the psychological mechanisms of influence, in particular maladaptive daydreaming, which increases audience vulnerability through immersion in imagined scenarios, detachment from reality, and functional impairment. The aim of the study was to analyse the relationship between the state of maladaptive daydreaming and informational and psychological influence through news content, as well as to test the hypothesis regarding the presence of triggers in news content capable of activating or intensifying this state. The methodological basis of the study comprised an interdisciplinary approach, doctrinal analysis of informational and psychological operations, content analysis, narrative analysis, and descriptive statistical processing of the results of coding maladaptive daydreaming triggers in news content. The empirical basis consisted of two blocks of internet materials, ten of which belonged to the Russian segment of the information space and ten to the Ukrainian segment. Each item was coded according to five parameters: the title of the material, the core narrative, the identified maladaptive daydreaming trigger, the probable psychological mechanism of influence, and the expected impact on the target audience. The characteristics of maladaptive daydreaming triggers in news content were identified, namely: narrative incompleteness and “serialisation”, oversaturation with emotional evaluations, intrusive modelling of future scenarios, personalisation of the war, hyperbolisation of threats or victories, as well as the use of multimodal amplifiers (clickbait headlines, audiovisual materials). The results of the study indicate that in the Russian block, counterfactual, catastrophic, fatalistic, and compensatory narratives predominate, modelling alternative realities, scenarios of rapid rescue, inevitable defeat, or final ending. Such semantic constructions potentially contribute to escapism, rumination, imagined restoration of control, and a reduction in audience agency. In the Ukrainian block, trigger potential was also identified; however, it is largely associated not with deliberate influence, but with the thematisation of trauma, loss, deferred life, exhaustion, and counterfactual scenarios – for example, “if not for the war…”. It was established that the vulnerability of target audiences to such messages may increase under conditions of prolonged stress, psychological fatigue, and mass traumatisation, which correspond to the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war

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