| Poster | Poster Session 04 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
12:00 pm - 01:15 pm
Room: Majestic Complex (Posters 61-120)
Poster Session 04: Neuroimaging | Neurostimulation/Neuromodulation | Teleneuropsychology/Technology
Final Abstract #99
"Permanent neurological cognitive delay": Cognitive symptoms on #PTSD TikTok
Brittany Rohl, University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
Laura Jones, University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
Rachel Nattis, University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
John Williamson, University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
Eric Porges, University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
Category: Teleneuropsychology/ Technology
Keyword 1: technology
Keyword 2: attention
Keyword 3: post-traumatic stress disorder
Objective:
Online communities provide space for individuals to find information and peer-to-peer support around their health conditions, and patients may use these resources to make sense of nonspecific cognitive symptoms such as attentional problems. A recent study reported that over 50% of the most-popular content on the short-form video platform Tiktok under the hashtag #ADHD was classified as misleading. The aim of the current study was to characterize the frequency and nature of cognitive symptoms as described in the most popular Tiktok content focused on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which has been associated with dysfunction in cognition above and beyond the effect of baseline IQ, with deficits observed in attention (simple auditory, sustained), working memory, and inhibition. We hypothesized that the most frequently-mentioned cognitive concern would be problems with attention.
Participants and Methods:
We conducted a search on TikTok using the hashtag #PTSD and retrieved the 100 most-liked videos. A publicly available GitHub package (tiktok-scraper) was used to scrape available metadata (views, shares, etc). Videos were independently coded by two reviewers for the presence and nature of the mention of cognitive symptoms (CS), the overall accuracy of the video (useful, personal experience, or misleading), whether the creator self-identified as a healthcare professional (HCP), and overall video understandability and actionability (using the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool for Audiovisual Materials, PEMAT-AV).
Results:
Of the 16 videos that mentioned CS, 9 mentioned problems with memory, and 7 mentioned problems with attention. Six were classified as useful, 7 were classified as personal experience, and 3 were classified as misleading. Of the 3 misleading videos, 1 was posted by creator self-identifying as a PhD-level psychologist. Misleading statements included “permanent neurological cognitive delay” and “no sense of direction”. Mention of CS was associated with an increased number of likes per post (𝛸2 [1, 100] = 5.75, p = 0.02), but not the number of shares and comments, accuracy of the overall video, or the understandability, actionability, or total PEMAT-AV scores. Videos posted by HCP were equally as likely to mention cognitive symptoms as were videos created by non-HCPs, 𝛸2 (1, 100) = 0.09, p = 0.75.
Conclusions:
Cognitive symptoms were mentioned in a small proportion of the most popular #PTSD TikTok videos and generally described a creator’s personal experience that was not overtly misleading. In the small subgroup of videos classified as misleading, incorrect suggestions of PTSD-related permanent neurological delay could be potentially harmful to patients’ self-efficacy. On online platforms in which engagement-driven algorithms determine the delivery of content to users, there may be increased incentives for creators to spread highly salient or unique information, which may conflict with its accuracy. It is important that clinicians are aware of trends in online discourse surrounding cognitive symptoms, which may inform patients’ conceptualizations of their experiences.
|
|---|
