What are you looking for?: an eye-tracking study of information usage in web search
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Cyberchondria: Studies of the escalation of medical concerns in Web search
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Predicting escalations of medical queries based on web page structure and content
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Context effect on query formulation and subjective relevance in health searches
Proceedings of the third symposium on Information interaction in context
Cyber patients surfing the medical web: Computer-mediated medical knowledge and perceived benefits
Computers in Human Behavior
Captions and biases in diagnostic search
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
Searching for health information online has become increasingly common, yet few studies have examined potential negative emotional effects of online health information search. We present results from an experiment manipulating the presentation of search results for common symptoms, which shows that the frequency and placement of serious illness mentions within results can influence perceptions of symptom severity and susceptibility of having the serious illness, respectively. The increase in severity and susceptibility can then lead to higher levels of negative emotional outcomes experienced--including feeling overwhelmed and frightened. Interestingly, health literacy can help reduce perceived symptom severity, and high online health experience actually increases the likelihood that individuals use a frequency-based heuristic. Technological implications and directions for future research are discussed.