People who struggle with their mental health are more likely to search for negative content online, and that negative content in turn worsens their symptoms, according to a series of studies by MIT researchers.
The group behind the research has developed a web plugin tool to help those seeking to protect their mental health make more informed decisions about the content they watch.
The findings were summarized in an open access article by Tali Sharotassociate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT and professor at University College London, and Christopher A. Kelly, a former visiting doctoral student who was a member of Sharot's Affective Brain Lab when the studies were conducted and who is now a postdoc at the University of Stanford. Institute for Human-Centered ai. The findings were published on November 21 in the magazine Nature Human Behavior.
“Our study shows a causal and bidirectional relationship between health and what is done online. We found that people who already have mental health symptoms are more likely to go online and search for information that ends up being negative or scary,” says Sharot. “After browsing this content, your symptoms worsen. “It’s a feedback loop.”
The studies analyzed the web browsing habits of more than 1,000 participants using natural language processing to calculate a negative score and a positive score for each web page visited, as well as scores for anger, fear, anticipation, confidence, surprise, sadness and happiness. and disgust. Participants also completed questionnaires to assess their mental health and indicated their mood directly before and after the web browsing sessions. The researchers found that participants expressed better moods after browsing less negative web pages, and participants with worse pre-browsing moods tended to browse more negative web pages.
In a subsequent study, participants were asked to read information from two web pages randomly selected from six negative web pages or six neutral pages. They then indicated their mood levels before and after viewing the pages. One analysis found that participants exposed to negative web pages reported being in a worse mood than those who viewed neutral pages and then visited more negative pages when asked to browse the Internet for 10 minutes.
“The results contribute to the current debate about the relationship between mental health and online behavior,” the authors wrote. “Most research addressing this relationship has focused on the amount of use, such as screen time or frequency of social media use, which has led to mixed conclusions. Here, instead, we focus on the type of content browsed and find that its affective properties are causally and bidirectionally related to mental health and mood.”
To test whether the intervention could alter web browsing choices and improve mood, the researchers provided participants with search engine results pages with three search results for each of several queries. Some participants were provided labels for each search result on a scale from “feeling better” to “feeling worse.” Other participants were not provided with any labels. Those who were provided with labels were less likely to choose negative content and more likely to choose positive content. A follow-up study found that those who viewed more positive content reported significantly better mood.
Based on these findings, Sharot and Kelly created a downloadable plugin tool called “Digital Diet” that provides scores for Google search results in three categories: emotion (whether people find the content positive or negative, on average), knowledge (how much the information on a web page helps people to understand a topic, on average), and actionability (how useful the information on a web page is on average). MIT electrical and computer engineering graduate student Jonatan Fontanez '24, a former MIT undergraduate researcher in Sharot's lab, also contributed to the development of the tool. The tool was presented publicly this week, along with the publication of the article in Nature Human Behavior.
“People with poorer mental health tend to seek out more negative and fear-inducing content, which in turn exacerbates their symptoms and creates a vicious feedback loop,” Kelly says. “We hope this tool can help them gain greater autonomy over what's going on in their minds and break negative cycles.”
