Currently submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 6, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 8, 2026 - Aug 3, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Online Health Information Seeking, Consideration of Future Consequences, and Self-Control Among Adults With Chronic Diseases: Cross-Sectional Survey Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Effective chronic disease management requires individuals to prioritize long-term health goals over immediate temptations. As chronic patients increasingly engage with online health information, it is important to understand how such engagement may relate to future-oriented cognition and self-regulatory capacity.
Objective:
This study examined the association between online health information seeking behavior (HISB) and self-control among adults with chronic diseases and investigated whether consideration of future consequences (CFC) was associated with this relationship.
Methods:
Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 11,031 adults with chronic diseases in China. Mediation analyses were conducted using SPSS macro PROCESS with 5,000 bootstrap samples while controlling for demographic, health-related, and psychological covariates.
Results:
HISB was positively associated with CFC (B=.07, SE=.005, p<.001). CFC was positively associated with self-control (B=.56, SE=.008, p<.001). After CFC was entered into the model, the direct association between HISB and self-control was no longer statistically significant (B=.005, SE=.004, p=.22). Bootstrap analyses indicated a significant indirect effect of HISB on self-control through CFC (B=.041, BootSE=.003, 95% CI .0348-.0479).
Conclusions:
The findings suggest that consideration of future consequences may help explain the association between online health information seeking and self-control among adults with chronic diseases. More broadly, digital health environments may increase the salience of future health consequences by repeatedly rendering long-term outcomes cognitively accessible in everyday life. Longitudinal and experimental research is needed to clarify causal mechanisms underlying these associations.
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