According to a series of studies conducted by scientists from MIT, people struggling with mental problems are more likely to view negative content on the Internet, which in turn worsens their symptoms.
The group responsible for the study developed web plugin tool to assist people who want to protect their mental health make more informed decisions about the content they watch.
The findings are presented in an open-access article by Tali Sharotassistant 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 at the time the research was conducted and is currently a graduate student at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. The arrangements were made published November 21 in the magazine
“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 apply the Internet and are more likely to view information that ends negatively or is fearful,” says Sharot. “After viewing this content, their symptoms worsen. It’s a feedback loop.”
The study analyzed the web browsing habits of over 1,000 participants, using natural language processing to calculate a negative and positive score for each website visited, as well as ratings of anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust. Participants also completed questionnaires to assess their mental health and indicated their mood immediately before and after their internet browsing sessions. The researchers found that participants had a better mood after viewing less negative websites, and participants with a worse mood before browsing tended to view more negative websites.
In another study, participants were asked to read information from two websites randomly selected from six negative or six neutral websites. They then indicated their mood levels both before and after viewing the pages. The analysis found that participants who were exposed to negative websites were in a worse mood than those who viewed neutral websites, and then, when asked to browse the Internet for 10 minutes, visited more negative websites.
“The results contribute to the ongoing debate about the relationship between mental health and online behavior,” the authors wrote. “Most research on this relationship has focused on quantity of use, such as duration of internet use or frequency of social media use, which has led to mixed conclusions. Here, however, we focus on the type of content viewed and find that its emotional properties are causally and bidirectionally related to mental health and mood.
To test whether the intervention could change Internet browsing choices and improve mood, researchers provided participants with search results pages containing three search results for each of several queries. Some participants were assigned labels for each search result on a scale from “feel better” to “feel worse.” The remaining participants did not receive any labels. Those who received labels were less likely to choose negative content and more likely to choose positive content. Further research showed that those who watched more positive content reported significantly better mood.
Based on these findings, Sharot and Kelly created plug-in tool download called the “Digital Diet”, which offers Google search results in three categories: emotions (do people evaluate the content positively or negatively on average), knowledge (to what extent the information on the website helps to understand the topic on average), and feasibility (on average to what extent does the information on the website are useful). MIT electrical engineering and computer science graduate student Jonatan Fontanez ’24, a former MIT research associate in the Sharot lab, also contributed to the development of the tool. The tool was presented to the public this week with the publication of a paper in .
“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 will help them gain more autonomy over what is on their mind and break negative cycles.”