Abstract: This study reviews the concept, research paradigms and influencing factors of health information avoidance, and summarizes three theories to explain the reasons of health information avoidance. Health information avoidance refers to the behavior of consciously prevent or delay the acquisition of available health information, which has an important impact on the prevention and treatment of diseases. Questionnaire and Virtual Disease Paradigm are the two research methods commonly used to examine health information avoidance. In the fields of psychology, journalism and communication, preventive medicine, loads of researchers have explored the factors that induce individuals to avoid health information. This paper reviewed the effects of individual factors, social factors and information factors on health information avoidance respectively. Individual factors refer to the personal characteristics or attributes, including health cognitive beliefs and perceived control. Social factors refer to people's perception of the outside world and the influence of specific cultural and social background, including objective and subjective social support and socioeconomic status. Information factor refers to the representation and quantity of information, the severity of Health Information and information overload will have an impact on health information avoidance. This study reviews the concept, research paradigms and influencing factors of health information avoidance, and summarizes three theories to explain the reasons of health information avoidance. Health information avoidance refers to the behavior of consciously prevent or delay the acquisition of available health information, which has an important impact on the prevention and treatment of diseases. Questionnaire and Virtual Disease Paradigm are the two research methods commonly used to examine health information avoidance. In the fields of psychology, journalism and communication, preventive medicine, loads of researchers have explored the factors that induce individuals to avoid health information. This paper reviewed the effects of individual factors, social factors and information factors on health information avoidance respectively. Individual factors refer to the personal characteristics or attributes, including health cognitive beliefs and perceived control. Social factors refer to people's perception of the outside world and the influence of specific cultural and social background, including objective and subjective social support and socioeconomic status. Information factor refers to the representation and quantity of information, the content of Health Information and information overload will have an impact on health information avoidance. Currently there are three theories that account for health information avoidance, namely perceived risk theory, information processing and decision-making system theory and resource model of threat management. The perceived risk theory regards health information as a kind of risk information, and assumes that risk perception of expected consequences and emotions is positively correlated with health information avoidance. The information processing and decision-making system theory assumes that individuals in the information processing will use the cold, hot system for processing, health information avoidance is the result of the dominance processing of hot system. Hot system can activate the brain area related to emotion, and make the individual carry out fear control, avoiding health information. The resource model of threat management explains the reasons of health information avoidance from the resource perspective, it regards health information avoidance as a kind of threat information. Threat management resource is a kind of cognitive resource, which consists of personal and interpersonal threat management resource. When the threat management resource is sufficient, the individual can deal with the health information, when the threat management resource is insufficient, individuals react defensively, avoiding health information. Future research is expected to give more attention to the classified study of health information avoidance, at the same time expand the research scope of health information avoidance, for example, pay attention to mental health information avoidance, and put forward the localization health information avoidance intervention program according to the situation of our country and so on.

Key words: health information avoidance, theoretical explanations, Individual factors, social factors, information factors

摘要： 健康信息回避是指有意识地防止或延迟获取可利用的身体健康信息的行为，对疾病的预防与治疗有着重要影响。本文通过回顾前人文献概述了个体因素、社会因素和信息因素对健康信息回避的影响。风险认知理论、信息处理与决策双加工系统理论和威胁资源管理模型为健康信息回避的产生提供了理论依据。未来研究可以关注健康信息回避的分类研究并扩展健康信息回避的研究范围，加强健康信息回避的实证干预研究并根据我国医疗背景开展健康信息回避的本土化研究。

关键词: 健康信息回避, 理论解释, 个体因素, 社会因素, 信息因素