According to a series of studies by researchers at MIT, people scuffling with their mental health usually tend to browse negative content online, and that negative content, in turn, worsens their symptoms.
The group behind the research has developed one Web plug-in tool to assist those that need to protect their mental health make more informed decisions in regards to the content they watch.
The results were presented 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 graduate student who was a member of Sharot's Affective Brain Lab on the time the studies were conducted and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI . The results were published November twenty first within the magazine
“Our study shows a causal, bidirectional relationship between health and what you do online. We found that individuals who have already got mental health symptoms usually tend to go browsing and usually tend to seek for information that finally ends up being negative or fearful,” says Sharot. “After viewing this content, their symptoms turn into worse. It’s a feedback loop.”
The studies analyzed the browsing habits of greater than 1,000 participants, using natural language processing to calculate a negative and a positive rating for every webpage visited, in addition to rankings for anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust. Participants also accomplished questionnaires assessing their mental health and reported their mood immediately before and after the Internet browsing sessions. The researchers found that participants expressed higher mood after browsing fewer negative web sites, and that participants with worse mood before browsing tended to browse more negative web sites.
In a subsequent study, participants were asked to read information from two web sites, randomly chosen from either six negative web sites or six neutral web sites. They then reported their mood each before and after viewing the pages. One evaluation found that participants who visited negative web sites reported being in a worse mood than those that viewed neutral sites and subsequently visited more negative sites when asked to surf the Internet for ten minutes.
“The results contribute to the continued debate in regards to the connection between mental health and online behavior,” the authors write. “Most research examining this relationship has focused on amount of usage, reminiscent of screen time or frequency of social media use, which has produced mixed conclusions. Here we focus as a substitute on the variety of content searched and find that its affective properties are causally and bidirectionally related to mental health and mood.”
To test whether an intervention could change Internet browsing decisions and improve mood, researchers provided participants with search engine results pages containing three search results for every of several search queries. Some participants got labels for every search result on a scale from “feeling higher” to “feeling worse.” Other participants didn’t receive labels. Those who were labeled were less more likely to select negative content and more more likely to select positive content. A follow-up study found that those that watched more positive content reported significantly higher moods.
Based on these findings, Sharot and Kelly created a downloadable plugin tool Called the “Digital Diet,” which provides rankings for Google search leads to three categories: Emotion (whether people, on average, find the content positive or negative), Knowledge (how much information on a webpage helps people, on average, understand a subject), and actionability (the extent to which information on an internet site is, on average, useful). MIT electrical engineering and computer science student Jonatan Fontanez '24, a former MIT undergraduate researcher in Sharot's lab, also contributed to the tool's development. The tool was released this week alongside the publication of the article in.
“People with poorer mental health are inclined to search out more negative and anxiety-provoking content, which in turn worsens their symptoms and creates a vicious feedback loop,” says Kelly. “We hope this tool can assist them gain more autonomy over what involves mind and break negative cycles.”
