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Our information diet is important. For example, people struggling with their mental health are more likely to browse negative content online, and in turn, that negative content makes their symptoms worse, according to a series of studies by researchers at MIT.
These findings were outlined by Tali Sharot, an adjunct professor of cognitive neuroscience 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 and is now a postdoc at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI.
"Our study shows a causal, bidirectional relationship between health and what you do online. We found that people who already have mental health symptoms are more likely to go online and more likely to browse for information that ends up being negative or fearful," Sharot says. "After browsing this content, their symptoms become worse. It is a feedback loop."
The studies looked at the browsing habits of more than 1,000 people, 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, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust.
Participants also completed questionnaires to assess their mental health and indicated their mood directly before and after browsing sessions. The researchers discovered that participants expressed better moods after browsing less-negative web pages, while 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 either six negative web pages or six neutral pages. They then indicated their mood levels both before and after viewing the pages. Again, the participants exposed to negative web pages reported being in a worse mood than those who viewed neutral pages and subsequently visited more-negative pages when asked to browse the internet for 10 minutes.
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"The results contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between mental health and online behavior," the researchers wrote.
"Most research addressing this relationship has focused on the quantity 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."
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But here's the part that turns this seemingly inconsequential list and other feel-good publications into something more than just a scroll.
The researchers found that interventions can alter browsing choices and improve mood—a follow-up study showed that those who viewed more positive content reported a significantly better mood.
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A study published in PLOS One supports this notion. It also found that being exposed to news that contains an element of kindness can ease the effects of reading distressing news stories.
"The negative exposure we have in the media makes us think that the world is more dangerous than it really is,” says Kathryn Buchanan, co-author of the paper and a psychology professor at the University of Essex, United Kingdom.
"Seeing others' kindness helps us maintain this belief that the world isn’t that bad."
