People scuffling with their mental health usually tend to browse negative content online, and in turn, that negative content makes their symptoms worse, in line with a series of studies by researchers at MIT.
The group behind the research has developed a web plug-in tool to assist those trying to protect their mental health make more informed decisions in regards to the content they view.
The findings were outlined in an open-access paper by Tali Sharot, an adjunct professor of cognitive neurosciences at MIT and professor at University College London, and Christopher A. Kelly, a former visiting PhD student who was a member of Sharot’s Affective Brain Lab when the studies were conducted, who’s now a postdoc at Stanford University’s Institute for Human Centered AI. The findings were published Nov. 21 within the journal
“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 surfing and more prone to browse for information that finally ends up being negative or fearful,” Sharot says. “After browsing this content, their symptoms develop into worse. It’s a feedback loop.”
The studies analyzed the online browsing habits of greater than 1,000 participants through the use of natural language processing to calculate a negative rating and a positive rating for every web page visited, in addition to scores for anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust. Participants also accomplished questionnaires to evaluate their mental health and indicated their mood directly before and after web-browsing sessions. The researchers found that participants expressed higher 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 chosen from either six negative webpages or six neutral pages. They then indicated their mood levels each before and after viewing the pages. An evaluation found that participants exposed to negative web pages reported to be in a worse mood than those that viewed neutral pages, after which subsequently visited more-negative pages when asked to browse the web for 10 minutes.
“The outcomes contribute to the continued debate regarding the connection between mental health and online behavior,” the authors wrote. “Most research addressing this relationship has focused on the amount of use, equivalent to screen time or frequency of social media use, which has led to mixed conclusions. Here, as a substitute, we give attention to the form of content browsed and find that its affective properties are causally and bidirectionally related to mental health and mood.”
To check whether intervention could alter web-browsing selections and improve mood, the researchers provided participants with search engine results pages with three search results for every of several queries. Some participants were provided labels for every search result on a scale of “feel higher” to “feel worse.” Other participants weren’t supplied with any labels. Those that were supplied with labels were less prone to select negative content and more prone to select positive content. A followup study found that those that viewed more positive content reported a significantly higher mood.
Based on these findings, Sharot and Kelly created a downloadable plug-in tool called “Digital Weight loss plan” that provides scores for Google search leads to three categories: emotion (whether people find the content positive or negative, on average), knowledge (to what extent information on a webpage helps people understand a subject, on average), and actionability (to what extent information on a webpage is beneficial on average). MIT electrical engineering and computer science graduate student Jonatan Fontanez ’24, a former undergraduate researcher from MIT in Sharot’s lab, also contributed to the event of the tool. The tool was introduced publicly this week, together with the publication of the paper in .
“Individuals with worse mental health are likely to hunt down more-negative and fear-inducing content, which in turn exacerbates their symptoms, making a vicious feedback loop,” Kelly says. “It’s our hope that this tool may also help them gain greater autonomy over what enters their minds and break negative cycles.”
