Background: High-quality medical resources are in high demand worldwide, and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical care may help alleviate the crisis related to this shortage. The development of the medical AI industry depends to a certain extent on whether industry experts have a comprehensive understanding of the public’s views on medical AI. Currently, the opinions of the general public on this matter remain unclear. Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore the public perception of AI in medical care through a content analysis of social media data, including specific topics that the public is concerned about; public attitudes toward AI in medical care and the reasons for them; and public opinion on whether AI can replace human doctors. Methods: Through an application programming interface, we collected a data set from the Sina Weibo platform comprising more than 16 million users throughout China by crawling all public posts from January to December 2017. Based on this data set, we identified 2315 posts related to AI in medical care and classified them through content analysis. Results: Among the 2315 identified posts, we found three types of AI topics discussed on the platform: (1) technology and application (n=987, 42.63%), (2) industry development (n=706, 30.50%), and (3) impact on society (n=622, 26.87%). Out of 956 posts where public attitudes were expressed, 59.4% (n=568), 34.4% (n=329), and 6.2% (n=59) of the posts expressed positive, neutral, and negative attitudes, respectively. The immaturity of AI technology (27/59, 46%) and a distrust of related companies (n=15, 25%) were the two main reasons for the negative attitudes. Across 200 posts that mentioned public attitudes toward replacing human doctors with AI, 47.5% (n=95) and 32.5% (n=65) of the posts expressed that AI would completely or partially replace human doctors, respectively. In comparison, 20.0% (n=40) of the posts expressed that AI would not replace human doctors. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that people are most concerned about AI technology and applications. Generally, the majority of people held positive attitudes and believed that AI doctors would completely or partially replace human ones. Compared with previous studies on medical doctors, the general public has a more positive attitude toward medical AI. Lack of trust in AI and the absence of the humanistic care factor are essential reasons why some people still have a negative attitude toward medical AI. We suggest that practitioners may need to pay more attention to promoting the credibility of technology companies and meeting patients’ emotional needs instead of focusing merely on technical issues.

Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet

Geographical psychology aims to study the spatial distribution of psychological phenomenon at different levels of geographical analysis and their relations to macro-level important societal outcomes. The geographical perspective provides a new way of understanding interactions between humankind psychological processes and distal macro-environments. Studies have identified the spatial organizations of a wide range of psychological constructs, including (but not limited among) personality, individualism/collectivism, cultural tightness-looseness, and well-being; these variations have been plotted over a range of geographical units (e.g., neighborhoods, cities, states, and countries) and have been linked to a broad array of political, economic, social, public health, and other social consequences. Future research should employ multi-level analysis, taking advantage of more deliberated causality test methods and big data techniques, to further examine the emerging and evolving mechanisms of geographical differences in psychological phenomena.

Health rumors not only incite unnecessary fears and skepticism, but may also cause individuals to refuse effective remedy and thus delay their treatment. Studies have found that health literacy may help the public identify the falsity of health rumors and avoid their negative impact. However, whether other types of literacy work in helping people disbelieve health rumors is still unknown. With a national survey in China (N = 1646), our study examined the effect of science literacy on rumor belief and further analyzed the moderating role of self-efficacy of science literacy in their relationship. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that science literacy significantly decreased the likelihood of people believing in health rumors, and moderator analysis showed that self-efficacy of science literacy plays a moderating role in this relationship; such that the relationship between science literacy and health rumor belief would be weakened if one′s self-efficacy of science literacy was low. This finding reveals that during campaigns to combat health rumors, improving and enhancing the self-efficacy of people′s science literacy is an effective way to prevent them from believing in health rumors. Our study highlights the benefits of science education in public health and the improvement of public science literacy.

Background: Previous studies have shown that suicide reporting in mainstream media has a significant impact on suicidal behaviors (eg, irresponsible suicide reporting can trigger imitative suicide). Traditional mainstream media are increasingly using social media platforms to disseminate information on public-related topics, including health. However, there is little empirical research on how mainstream media portrays suicide on social media platforms and the quality of their coverage. Objective: This study aims to explore the characteristics and quality of suicide reporting by mainstream publishers via social media in China. Methods: Via the application programming interface of the social media accounts of the top 10 Chinese mainstream publishers (eg, People’s Daily and Beijing News), we obtained 2366 social media posts reporting suicide. This study conducted content analysis to demonstrate the characteristics and quality of the suicide reporting. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, we assessed the quality of suicide reporting by indicators of harmful information and helpful information. Results: Chinese mainstream publishers most frequently reported on suicides stated to be associated with conflict on their social media (eg, 24.47% [446/1823] of family conflicts and 16.18% [295/1823] of emotional frustration). Compared with the suicides of youth (730/1446, 50.48%) and urban populations (1454/1588, 91.56%), social media underreported suicides in older adults (118/1446, 8.16%) and rural residents (134/1588, 8.44%). Harmful reporting practices were common (eg, 54.61% [1292/2366] of the reports contained suicide-related words in the headline and 49.54% [1172/2366] disclosed images of people who died by suicide). Helpful reporting practices were very limited (eg, 0.08% [2/2366] of reports provided direct information about support programs). Conclusions: The suicide reporting of mainstream publishers on social media in China broadly had low adherence to the WHO guidelines. Considering the tremendous information dissemination power of social media platforms, we suggest developing national suicide reporting guidelines that apply to social media. By effectively playing their separate roles, we believe that social media practitioners, health institutions, social organizations, and the general public can endeavor to promote responsible suicide reporting in the Chinese social media environment.

There is a paucity of literature on the roles of media exposure, general trust, and their interactions in long-term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms after a natural disaster. Trying to address this knowledge gap, our study aimed to (a) investigate whether exposure to media coverage during the traumatic event and general trust directly affected adult survivors’ long-term PTSD symptoms 10 years after the 5.12 Wenchuan earthquake, and (b) to identify the potential differential pattern of the influence of media exposure on PTSD symptoms for adult survivors with various levels of general trust. Using cross-sectional methodology, we surveyed participants (N = 1000) recruited from six disaster-affected counties. We assessed PTSD symptoms, media exposure, general trust, demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, and earthquake exposure. Data were analyzed descriptively and with Tobit regression analyses. Reversed relationships between general trust and PTSD were verified, whereas no direct links were found between media exposure and PTSD. Interaction tests revealed that media exposure alleviated PTSD for high-trust survivors, but aggravated PTSD for low-trust survivors. These results suggest that general trust building should be considered in post-disaster construction activities.