Predictors of Cyberchondria During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-sectional Study Using Supervised Machine Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cyberchondria is characterized by repeated and compulsive online searches for health information, resulting in increased health anxiety and distress. It has been conceptualized as a multidimensional construct fueled by both anxiety and compulsivity-related factors and described as a "transdiagnostic compulsive behavioral syndrome," which is associated with health anxiety, problematic internet use, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Cyberchondria is not included in the International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, and its defining features, etiological mechanisms, and assessment continue to be debated. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate changes in the severity of cyberchondria during the COVID-19 pandemic and identify the predictors of cyberchondria at this time. METHODS: Data collection started on May 4, 2020, and ended on June 10, 2020, which corresponds to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. At the time the study took place, French-speaking countries in Europe (France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg) all implemented lockdown or semilockdown measures. The survey consisted of a questionnaire collecting demographic information (sex, age, education level, and country of residence) and information about socioeconomic circumstances during the first lockdown (eg, economic situation, housing, and employment status) and was followed by several instruments assessing various psychological and health-related constructs. Inclusion criteria for the study were being at least 18 years of age and having a good understanding of French. Self-report data were collected from 725 participants aged 18-77 (mean 33.29, SD 12.88) years, with females constituting the majority (416/725, 57.4%). RESULTS: The results showed that the COVID-19 pandemic affected various facets of cyberchondria: cyberchondria-related distress and compulsion increased (distress z=-3.651, P<.001; compulsion z=-5.697, P<.001), whereas the reassurance facet of cyberchondria decreased (z=-6.680, P<.001). In addition, COVID-19-related fears and health anxiety emerged as the strongest predictors of cyberchondria-related distress and interference with functioning during the pandemic. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide evidence of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cyberchondria and identify factors that should be considered in efforts to prevent and manage cyberchondria at times of public health crises. In addition, they are consistent with a theoretical model of cyberchondria during the COVID-19 pandemic proposed in 2020. These findings have implications for the conceptualization and future assessment of cyberchondria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".