This paper focuses on the "double-edged sword effect" of the depression community in online health communities represented by Xiaohongshu, assessing its ability to provide positive functions such as emotional support, information sharing, and destigmatization, as well as its potential to amplify negative experiences through emotional reinforcement and anxiety feedback loops. A review of the latest evidence integrating social support network structures, digital narratives and peer support, emotional signals such as music and labels, multimodal and temporal approaches, points out that existing studies are mostly cross-sectional or corpora-dependent, with insufficient causal inference, platform interaction and cultural adaptation. Based on this, it is recommended to combine time series, multimodal sensing, and cross-cultural calibration to test the causal effects of algorithms through longitudinal or natural experiments, and to emphasize the need for ethical governance and human-automation interventions to suppress the risk of emotional amplification while preserving the value of social support.

Pengqing Yin. Online Health Communities as a Double-Edged Sword: A Systematic Review of Emotional Amplification and Anxiety Feedback in Depression-Oriented Networks. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2026), Vol. 9, Issue 5: 36-42. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2026.090506.

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