Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 4, 2023
Date Accepted: Jun 7, 2024
Differences in Fear and Negatively Levels between Formal and Informal Health-Related Websites: an Analysis of Sentiments and Emotions
ABSTRACT
Background:
Searching for online health-related information is frequently performed by the public, and may affect public behavior regarding health decision-making. Particularly, it may result in anxiety, erroneous and harmful self-diagnosis. Most searched health-related topics are cancer diseases, cardiovascular diseases and infectious diseases. A health-related online search may result in either formal or informal medical websites, both of which may evoke feelings of fear and negativity.
Objective:
Our study aimed to assess whether there is a difference in fear and negativity levels between health-related information appearing on formal and informal health-related websites.
Methods:
A web search was performed to retrieve the contents of websites containing symptoms of selected diseases, using selected common symptoms. Retrieved websites were classified into formal and informal categories. Fear and negativity of each content were evaluated using two transformers. A third transformer model was fine-tuned using an existing emotion dataset obtained from an online health community. For formal and informal websites, fear levels and negativity levels were averaged. T-tests were conducted to evaluate the differences in fear and negativity levels between formal and informal websites.
Results:
Fear levels as well as negativity levels were statistically significant higher in formal websites compared to informal websites.
Conclusions:
Positive texts may increase the credibility of formal health websites, and increase their usage by the general public, and the public’s compliance to the recommendations. Increasing the usage of NLP tools before publishing health-related information to achieve a more positive and less stressful text to be transmitted to the public is recommended.
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