Our social media posts contain more clues about our minds and moods than we think.
“What do you think?” Facebook and social media send its 1.7 billion active subscribers every morning. Many psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, etc., ask this question when starting a session with their patients. When we see a friend or relative with some thoughtfulness, we turn to the same question.
Our activities on social media contain a lot of information about our mood. Experts explore how individuals, societies, nations, and even humanity in general can use this data to keep an “emotional pulse”. This will be one of the topics that will be discussed at the BBC Future’s World-Changing Ideas Summit to be held in Sydney in November.
What do the posts indicate?
What we write and share on social media and how often we do it says a lot about our personality and what we experience. In a study conducted with 555 Facebook members in the USA, it was seen that extroverted people shared about their daily lives and social activities and did so frequently.
People with low self-esteem were more likely to post about their spouses or lovers, nervous, neurotic people were more likely to go to Facebook for approval and attention, and narcissists were more likely to post status updates to showcase their success, diet, or exercise program.
Another study concluded that those who frequently post their selfies in the form of selfies are generally more narcissistic and psychopathic, while those who make minor digital corrections of their own photos have low self-esteem.
Is social media used for therapeutic purposes?
Anyone who posts an angry note on Facebook or makes a desperate tweet early in the morning is aware that social media use is actually a form of therapy. Well, does this have the effect of shouting problems into a void and returning with a greater resonance, rather than benefiting people?
A mental health center in Mexico is of the same opinion and has launched a campaign to warn the public that Facebook is not a cheap therapy alternative. But actually this space is listening to you and can be helpful. Researchers are working on detecting clues about suicide risk, for example, from people’s Facebook status updates or Twitter posts.
An Australian institute, which will be making a presentation at the November summit, used a computer program to analyze two months of tweets and search for some terms associated with suicide.
The computer program and the researchers classified the tweets that were risky from two separate branches. It was seen that both classifications overlap and attention was drawn to the possibility of identifying people in need of help and warning families and doctors, thanks to appropriate computer programs.
Some internet groups also focus on finding warnings about suicide and providing support. For example, Reddit has created a Suicide Surveillance site to support its members at risk.
Although internet communities are sometimes the scene of inappropriate comments by trolls in such situations, there have always been more and more willing to lend a helping hand to those who need help.
Not being visible on social media may also indicate mental health problems. With an application program using Bluetooth, the social media activity of young people can be observed and the times when their communication with their friends decrease can be determined. This can often be a sign of depression.
Can social media show other emotional tendencies?
Societies, nations, human ups and downs often live together. In Australia, the Black Dog Institute and the scientific institution CSIRO are trying to take the emotional pulse of the whole world with the “We Fell” initiative. In order to determine the emotional state of Twitter users at a given moment, 19 thousand tweets per minute are analyzed with tweets containing emotional terms and 1 percent random sample tweets.
The map created from this point of view shows emotional states such as surprise, joy, love, sadness, anger, fear in percentages in different parts of the world. Depending on the developments in the country or in the world, this emotional state becomes different.
The Hedonometer Project tries to understand the happiness status of different languages by following the Twitter feed in languages such as English, French and Arabic. The most used 10 thousand words in a language and their degree of positivity and negativity are determined, and then the happiness status of the languages is determined based on the frequency of their use.
Accordingly, it was seen that we had a positive trend in general, but Spanish and Portuguese were happier. With the same approach, this team tries to understand the average happiness status on Twitter and the effects of events such as the US Presidential election, Brad and Angelina’s divorce, legal recognition of same-sex marriage on this situation.
It also examines how factors such as socioeconomic status, geography and demographic structure affect happiness in the USA. For all these reasons, the next time you surf social media, act by knowing what kind of clues what you read and share hold about you.
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