What Your Facebook Posts Say About Your Mental Health
For some people, posting to social media is as automatic as breathing. At lunchtime, you might pop off about the latest salad offering at your local lettucery. Or, late that night, you might tweet, “I can’t sleep, so I think I’m just going to have a glass of wine” without a second thought.
Over time, all these Facebook posts, Instagram captions, and tweets have become a treasure trove of human thought and feeling. People might rarely look back on their dashed-off online thoughts, but if their posts are publicly accessible, they’re ripe for analysis. And some psychologists are using algorithms to figure out what exactly it is we mean by these supposedly off-the-cuff pronouncements.
According to new research, for instance, a tweet like “I’m up at 2 a.m. drinking wine by myself” says one thing pretty clearly: “I’m lonely.” For a in , researchers at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 400 million tweets posted by people in Pennsylvania from 2012 to or , and compared them with a control group with similar demographics. (The authors did not explicitly ask those who often tweeted about loneliness whether they actually were lonely.)
