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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.