Study the results of volunteers browsing websites with negative, positive or neutral content.
If you’re the kind of person who scrolls through negative news on your cell phone every chance you get, think again. A new study suggests that the drift of suffering negatively affects mood and increases the risk of depression.
Doom scrolling is a term that describes overexposure to negative or depressing content on social media and the Internet in general. Those who do this systematically often don’t try to move away from the negative things they see or read, but instead gravitate towards them more and more.
A new study found that doom scrollers have worse mental health and mood. But both improve when they change the online content they’re exposed to. Additionally, those with poor mental health and mood are more likely to pay attention to negative online content.
The researchers emphasize that these findings suggest that the relationship between content and mental health is causal and bidirectional.
New findings Published in the medical journal Nature Human Behavior. Scientists from University College London (UCL) conducted a series of four experiments involving a total of 1145 volunteers. Their average age was between 33 and 36 years old, depending on the experiment.
All passed psychological tests. Then they were asked to surf the Internet for 30 minutes. The scientists then looked at the content they engaged in to see if it was negative or positive.
The examination included an analysis of the language used by the sites it was linked to. They found that those who suffered from depression and generally had the worst mental health viewed negative content.
The researchers wanted to find out if this was a coincidence or if there was a cause-and-effect relationship. In subsequent experiments, they found both to be true. Volunteers who saw more negative content felt worse and then sought out even more negative content, entering a destructive vicious cycle.
Change in content
But when researchers asked them to browse websites with neutral content, their mental state didn’t suffer as much. And in a recent experiment, he showed an improvement in his mood when he started looking at websites with positive content.
These findings confirm that people who suffer from depression and are generally in a bad mood engage in stimuli that perpetuate their sadness. Considering that most people spend 6.5 hours online each day, this is extremely worrying.
But at the same time, it’s encouraging because it suggests that sufferers may reap unexpected benefits if they focus on more positive content.