Threat elicits a positive bias during health-related Internet search

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.