Maykala Owens

Health information seeking has been found to be associated with increased preventative health behaviors. In the interest of increasing this behavior, researchers have examined emotions that can lead to increased information seeking. Anxiety has been shown to increase health information seeking, likely as a means to reduce the feeling of uncertainty commonly associated with anxiety. However, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding whether non-specific anxiety is sufficient to activate this increased information-seeking response, or if the anxiety must be relevant to the information being sought-out. Therefore, the purpose of this study will be to compare the effects of anxiety relevant to COVID-19, and general anxiety, on COVID-19 information seeking. Velten mood inductions and measures of observational information seeking behavior will be used to examine this effect. In doing so, this study aims to establish some empirical groundwork highlighting context-specific emotions that increase health information seeking, and ultimately increase preventative health behaviors.