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
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Health Information Avoidance:Influencing Factors of and Theoretical Explanation[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2023, 46(1): 238-244
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