Our social media posts contain more clues than we think about our minds and moods.
Facebook 1.7 billion active subscribers every morning “What do you think?” with the question. Most psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors etc. also ask this question when starting a session with their patients. When we see a friend or a relative thoughtfully, we turn to the same question.
Our activities on social media contain a lot of information about our mood. Experts are investigating how individuals, communities, nations, and even humanity in general, can benefit from this data to maintain the “emotional pulse”. This will be one of the topics to be discussed at the BBC Future Summit on Changing Ideas in Sydney in November.
What do the shares indicate?
What we write and share on social media, and how often we do it, tells us a lot about our personality and our experiences. In a study conducted with 555 Facebook members in the USA, it was seen that extroverted people shared their daily lives and social activities and they did this frequently.
People with low self-esteem tended to share more about their spouses or lovers, angry, neurotic people tended to enter Facebook to get approval and attention, narcissists tended to make status updates to show off their success, diets, or exercise programs.
Another study concluded that those who often share their photographs in the form of selfies often have more narcissistic and psychopathic features, and those who make small digital corrections in their photographs have little self-esteem.
Is social media used for therapy?
Anyone who shares an angry note on Facebook or a desperate tweet in the morning knows that the use of social media actually involves some kind of therapy. So, does this have the effect of shouting the problems into a void and returning them with greater resonance than human benefit?
In Mexico, a mental health center has launched a campaign that warns the public that Facebook is not a cheap therapy alternative. But this gap actually listens to you and can help. Researchers are working on predetermining clues about the risk of suicide, for example, based on people’s status updates on Facebook or Twitter posts.
An Australian institute, who was to make a presentation at the summit in November, looked through two-month tweets through a computer program and searched for some terms associated with suicide.
The computer program and researchers categorized risk-bearing tweets from two different branches. Both classifications were found to overlap and the possibility of alerting families and doctors was identified by identifying people in need of help through appropriate computer programs.
Some internet groups also focus on finding and sharing support in the form of warnings about suicide. For example, Reddit created a Suicide Surveillance site to support its members at risk.
Although the Internet community sometimes offers inappropriate interpretations of trolls in these situations, there has always been more to help those who need help.
Not being visible on social media may also indicate mental health problems. With an application program that uses Bluetooth, the social media activity of young people can be observed and when their communication with friends is reduced. This can often be a sign of depression.
Can social media show other emotional tendencies?
Societies, nations and humanity often live together. In Australia, the Black Dog Institute and the scientific institute CSIRO “We Fell” are trying to keep the emotional pulse of the whole world. In order to determine the emotions of Twitter users at a certain moment, tweets containing emotional terms and 1 percent random sample tweet are reviewed at 19 thousand tweets per minute.
Based on this, the map shows emotions such as surprise, joy, love, sadness, anger and fear in percentages in different parts of the world. According to the developments in the country or in the world, this mood changes.
The Hedonometer Project tries to understand the happiness of different languages by watching Twitter flow in English, French and Arabic. The most commonly used 10 thousand words in a language and their degree of positivity and negativity are determined, and then the happiness of the languages is determined based on the frequency of their use.
Accordingly, we found a positive trend in general, but Spanish and Portuguese were happier. With the same approach, this team is trying to understand the average happiness on Twitter and the effects of events such as the US Presidential election, Brad and Angelina’s divorce, the legal recognition of feminine marriage.
In addition, the factors such as socioeconomic status, geography and demographic structure affect happiness in the USA. For all these reasons, the next time you surf the social media, act on knowing what clues you have read and shared about you.
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