Exploring Antecedents of Cyberchondria During Pandemics: An integration of Stress and Coping and SOR

Abstract

Online health information seeking (OHIS) has become the main approach to obtaining health information especially during Covid-19 pandemic. Being increasingly exposed to online health information, cyberchondria, one of the dark sides of excessive online information exposure, has attracted increasing attention. Prior research has concentrated primarily on how information overload can affect cyberchondria. As a pattern composed of cognition, emotion and behavior, cyberchondria may be affected by the subjective emotional and behavioral factors, such as fear of missing out (FoMO) as well as excessive communication online via social media. Based on the theory of stress and coping and stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework, a research model was proposed to examine the mechanism underlying the impact of exposure to online health information on information overload and communication overload with FoMO as a moderator, which subsequently affects cyberchondria. Online survey will be conducted for data collection. Data analysis methods and the expected contribution is discussed

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