Threat elicits a positive bias during health-related Internet
search
Authors
K. Sassenberg
H. Greving
Abstract
The Internet provides easy access to health information. Compared to
traditional sources (e.g. doctors, brochures), information acquisition on the Internet is more
self-guided. This gives room to biases. In general, subjective threat elicits preferential
processing of positive information. Therefore, we predicted that health-related threat elicits
a positive bias also during Internet searches about health issues. A two-wave longitudinal
study with patients suffering from a chronic disease (N=208) and three experiments in which
threat was induced (N=121) tested for long-term and immediate effects of threat on information
acquisition during Internet search. The longitudinal study demonstrated that the stronger
participants’ health threat was, the stronger was their health self-esteem if they used the
Internet frequently, but not if they used it rarely to acquire health information. The
experiments showed that threat positively biases search term generation, link selection,
memory, and evaluations of treatments after an Internet search. Thus, health-related Internet
searches under threat might facilitate emotional coping with health threat, but they also
contribute to biased perceptions of own health and potential treatments.