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The Internet revolution has so many positive characteristics that make human life more comfortable and very easy to obtain information on virtually any subject or issue. Understandably, searching for information about health online is now a common phenomenon. The use of the Internet is relatively cheaper than conventional modes of obtaining information. The Internet also affords easy access to information easily and quickly without administrative bottlenecks to navigate. Even more importantly for many users, the Internet provides anonymity since they can make any form of investigation without shame and stigma that are often associated with presenting at a facility to make health-related inquiries. It has been estimated that as many as 75% of people in countries such as India, China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, United States, Germany, Australia, and Italy use the Internet for health-related inquiries (McDaid & Park, 2010). According to the Harris Poll, about 90% of internet use in the United States was for health-related information (Harris, 2010), indicating that the internet is fast becoming the most popular and important source of information about health (Howell, 2013).
These initial positive impacts have varied influence on different people with respect to several domains of their lives such as body image, psychological health, adjustment and social connectedness. With time, the user may enter into a specific response, then into a habitual response, and finally into a compulsive response. One of these adverse effects is cyberchondria – excessive use of the Internet to search for health-related information. In some extreme conceptualizations, cyberchondria has been viewed as the current form of hypochondriasis (Koehler, 2005), with Valley (2001) contending that it is a mental disorder. Conversely, it has occasionally been regarded as merely looking for health information online (Taylor, 2002). A more balanced definition is the one which considers the major ingredients of cyberchondria - health anxiety and searching for health information online. It has been suggested that individuals with cyberchondria are prone to experiencing intense health anxiety, which motivates the affected individuals to continually search for pertinent information on Internet but which, interestingly, simply aggravates their nervousness (White & Horvitz, 2009a; Starcevic & Berle, 2013; McElroy & Shevlin, 2014). Additional definitions suggest that a preoccupation with searching for information about health online can predispose individuals to elevated levels of anxiety (Aiken & Kirwan, 2014), and that individuals without pre-morbid health anxiety might result to having greater levels of health anxiety due to excessive search for health-related information online. McElroy and Shevlin (2014) defined cyberchondria as a rise in anxiety about an individual’s own health status, due to excessive online checks for health-related information.
It has been demonstrated in various studies across countries (e.g. Brooks et al., 2020; Khazaal et al., 2020; Lawal et al., 2020; Lin et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020) that COVID-19 pandemic had some significant psychological implications on people. The pandemic has caused high levels of distress, financial worry, anxiety, depression, poor self-esteem, loneliness, confusion, poor coping and aggression (Brooks et al., 2020; Lawal et al., 2020; Lin et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). The high level of unpredictability surrounding the COVID-19 and the associated negative emotionality may predispose people to excessively seeking heath information online. Thus, neuroticism which has been argued to mirror the propensity to have negative reactions, thoughts with maladaptive behavior (Bajcar & Babiak, 2020), may be strongly associated with cyberchondria in the era of COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown that people who are high in neuroticism might show increased negative effects in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic (Aschwanden et al., 2020; Kroencke et al., 2020). In a recent study, a positive association was found between cyberchondria and neuroticism (Maftel & Holman, 2020), implying that individuals who worry a lot during this pandemic are more likely to excessively search for health-related information online in order to reduce their concerns.