3/3 So, monitoring the questions people ask online—rather than just the topic they search for—could reveal clues about both population and individual stress levels.

2/3 We examined this in two contexts:

1. A population-level study during COVID (Google “How” searches + self-reported stress)
2. A controlled experiment where stress was induced.

In both, higher stress aligned with an uptick in “How” queries.

6/ Sign up for the Digital Diet beta waiting list: affectivebrain.com?page_id=7596

Discover more in our preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2410.03866

@uclpals.bsky.social @uclofficial.bsky.social

5/ We have transformed this intervention into a new tool—Digital Diet—designed to improve web-browsing by labelling the emotional tone, practicality, and informativeness of online content.

4/ But there’s hope! We labelled the emotional impact of Google search results (indicating whether they were likely to make users feel better, worse, or neutral), which helped users make informed browsing choices, reduced exposure to negative content, and improved their mood.

3/ Causality: By manipulating the webpages people browsed, we then showed that:
-Negative content worsens mood;
-Worse mood drives people to browse negative content, creating a self-reinforcing loop.

2/ Using NLP, we analysed the emotional tone of webpages participants browsed (N = 1,145). We found that participants with poorer mental health tended to browse more negative content, which subsequently left them feeling worse.