Language use is a psychologically rich, stable individual difference with well-established correlations to personality. We describe a method for assessing personality using an open-vocabulary ...analysis of language from social media. We compiled the written language from 66,732 Facebook users and their questionnaire-based self-reported Big Five personality traits, and then we built a predictive model of personality based on their language. We used this model to predict the 5 personality factors in a separate sample of 4,824 Facebook users, examining (a) convergence with self-reports of personality at the domain- and facet-level; (b) discriminant validity between predictions of distinct traits; (c) agreement with informant reports of personality; (d) patterns of correlations with external criteria (e.g., number of friends, political attitudes, impulsiveness); and (e) test-retest reliability over 6-month intervals. Results indicated that language-based assessments can constitute valid personality measures: they agreed with self-reports and informant reports of personality, added incremental validity over informant reports, adequately discriminated between traits, exhibited patterns of correlations with external criteria similar to those found with self-reported personality, and were stable over 6-month intervals. Analysis of predictive language can provide rich portraits of the mental life associated with traits. This approach can complement and extend traditional methods, providing researchers with an additional measure that can quickly and cheaply assess large groups of participants with minimal burden.
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Throughout history, scholars and laypeople alike have believed that our words contain subtle clues about what we are like as people, psychologically speaking. However, the ways in which language has ...been used to infer psychological processes has seen dramatic shifts over time and, with modern computational technologies and digital data sources, we are on the verge of a massive revolution in language analysis research. In this article, we discuss the past and current states of research at the intersection of language analysis and psychology, summarizing the central successes and shortcomings of psychological text analysis to date. We additionally outline and discuss a critical need for language analysis practitioners in the social sciences to expand their view of verbal behavior. Lastly, we discuss the trajectory of interdisciplinary research on language and the challenges of integrating analysis methods across paradigms, recommending promising future directions for the field along the way.
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We studied whether medical conditions across 21 broad categories were predictable from social media content across approximately 20 million words written by 999 consenting patients. Facebook language ...significantly improved upon the prediction accuracy of demographic variables for 18 of the 21 disease categories; it was particularly effective at predicting diabetes and mental health conditions including anxiety, depression and psychoses. Social media data are a quantifiable link into the otherwise elusive daily lives of patients, providing an avenue for study and assessment of behavioral and environmental disease risk factors. Analogous to the genome, social media data linked to medical diagnoses can be banked with patients' consent, and an encoding of social media language can be used as markers of disease risk, serve as a screening tool, and elucidate disease epidemiology. In what we believe to be the first report linking electronic medical record data with social media data from consenting patients, we identified that patients' Facebook status updates can predict many health conditions, suggesting opportunities to use social media data to determine disease onset or exacerbation and to conduct social media-based health interventions.
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Facebook language predicts depression in medical records Eichstaedt, Johannes C.; Smith, Robert J.; Merchant, Raina M. ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
10/2018, Volume:
115, Issue:
44
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Depression, the most prevalent mental illness, is underdiagnosed and undertreated, highlighting the need to extend the scope of current screening methods. Here, we use language from Facebook posts of ...consenting individuals to predict depression recorded in electronic medical records. We accessed the history of Facebook statuses posted by 683 patients visiting a large urban academic emergency department, 114 of whom had a diagnosis of depression in their medical records. Using only the language preceding their first documentation of a diagnosis of depression, we could identify depressed patients with fair accuracy area under the curve (AUC) = 0.69, approximately matching the accuracy of screening surveys benchmarked against medical records. Restricting Facebook data to only the 6 months immediately preceding the first documented diagnosis of depression yielded a higher prediction accuracy (AUC = 0.72) for those users who had sufficient Facebook data. Significant prediction of future depression status was possible as far as 3 months before its first documentation. We found that language predictors of depression include emotional (sadness), interpersonal (loneliness, hostility), and cognitive (preoccupation with the self, rumination) processes. Unobtrusive depression assessment through social media of consenting individuals may become feasible as a scalable complement to existing screening and monitoring procedures.
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We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in ...language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase 'sick of' and the word 'depressed'), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive 'my' when mentioning their 'wife' or 'girlfriend' more often than females use 'my' with 'husband' or 'boyfriend'). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality.
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Researchers and policy makers worldwide are interested in measuring the subjective well-being of populations. When users post on social media, they leave behind digital traces that reflect their ...thoughts and feelings. Aggregation of such digital traces may make it possible to monitor well-being at large scale. However, social media-based methods need to be robust to regional effects if they are to produce reliable estimates. Using a sample of 1.53 billion geotagged English tweets, we provide a systematic evaluation of word-level and data-driven methods for text analysis for generating well-being estimates for 1,208 US counties. We compared Twitter-based county-level estimates with well-being measurements provided by the Gallup- Sharecare Well-Being Index survey through 1.73 million phone surveys. We find that word-level methods (e.g., Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count LIWC 2015 and Language Assessment by Mechanical Turk LabMT) yielded inconsistent county-level wellbeing measurements due to regional, cultural, and socioeconomic differences in language use. However, removing as few as three of the most frequent words led to notable improvements in well-being prediction. Data-driven methods provided robust estimates, approximating the Gallup data at up to r = 0.64. We show that the findings generalized to county socioeconomic and health outcomes and were robust when poststratifying the samples to be more representative of the general US population. Regional well-being estimation from social media data seems to be robust when supervised data-driven methods are used.
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Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, ...feel and behave. Such characteristics were derived through theory, dictionary analyses, and survey research using explicit self-reports. The availability of social media data spanning millions of users now makes it possible to automatically derive characteristics from behavioral data-language use-at large scale. Taking advantage of linguistic information available through Facebook, we study the process of inferring a new set of potential human traits based on unprompted language use. We subject these new traits to a comprehensive set of evaluations and compare them with a popular five factor model of personality. We find that our language-based trait construct is often more generalizable in that it often predicts non-questionnaire-based outcomes better than questionnaire-based traits (e.g. entities someone likes, income and intelligence quotient), while the factors remain nearly as stable as traditional factors. Our approach suggests a value in new constructs of personality derived from everyday human language use.
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The language that individuals use for expressing themselves contains rich psychological information. Recent significant advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL), namely ...transformers, have resulted in large performance gains in tasks related to understanding natural language. However, these state-of-the-art methods have not yet been made easily accessible for psychology researchers, nor designed to be optimal for human-level analyses. This tutorial introduces text (https://r-text.org/), a new R-package for analyzing and visualizing human language using transformers, the latest techniques from NLP and DL. The text-package is both a modular solution for accessing state-of-the-art language models and an end-to-end solution catered for human-level analyses. Hence, text provides user-friendly functions tailored to test hypotheses in social sciences for both relatively small and large data sets. The tutorial describes methods for analyzing text, providing functions with reliable defaults that can be used off-the-shelf as well as providing a framework for the advanced users to build on for novel pipelines. The reader learns about three core methods: (1) textEmbed(): to transform text to modern transformer-based word embeddings; (2) textTrain() and textPredict(): to train predictive models with embeddings as input, and use the models to predict from; (3) textSimilarity() and textDistance(): to compute semantic similarity/distance scores between texts. The reader also learns about two extended methods: (1) textProjection()/textProjectionPlot() and (2) textCentrality()/textCentralityPlot(): to examine and visualize text within the embedding space.
Translational Abstract
Natural language is the fundamental way individuals communicate their thoughts and emotions to others. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), referred to as transformers, have resulted in large increases in performance at most tasks related to understanding natural language. This tutorial introduces how to use these state-of-the-art AI techniques in both custom research analyses as well as in completely end-to-end analytic processes. We describe text, a software package which provides transformer-based techniques intended to be easily accessible for social scientists. The text-package is open-source, written for the statistical programming language R, and it is free to use or alter. It comprises user-friendly functions to transform text to numeric representations, that are used for examining their relationship to other variables or for visualizing statistically significant features of texts. Transformers can facilitate analyses of natural language for gaining psychological insights with unprecedented accuracy and provide a more detailed understanding of the human condition.
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As of March 2021, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been responsible for over 115 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, resulting in over 2.5 million deaths. As the virus spread exponentially, so did its media ...coverage, resulting in a proliferation of conflicting information on social media platforms-a so-called "infodemic." In this viewpoint, we survey past literature investigating the role of automated accounts, or "bots," in spreading such misinformation, drawing connections to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also review strategies used by bots to spread (mis)information and examine the potential origins of bots. We conclude by conducting and presenting a secondary analysis of data sets of known bots in which we find that up to 66% of bots are discussing COVID-19. The proliferation of COVID-19 (mis)information by bots, coupled with human susceptibility to believing and sharing misinformation, may well impact the course of the pandemic.
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Researchers have long measured people's thoughts, feelings, and personalities using carefully designed survey questions, which are often given to a relatively small number of volunteers. The ...proliferation of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, offers alternative measurement approaches: automatic content coding at unprecedented scales and the statistical power to do open-vocabulary exploratory analysis. We describe a range of automatic and partially automatic content analysis techniques and illustrate how their use on social media generates insights into subjective well-being, health, gender differences, and personality.
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