Word use, personality and well-being
The words people use on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and
Google search queries are a rich, if imperfect, source of information
about their
personality and psychological state. We are developing methods to
estimate variation in subjective
well-being over time and space from social media word use. For
example,
we are characterizing how word use in Facebook posts varies
as a function of age, sex, IQ, personality (OCEAN: openness,
conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), and
subjective well-being and what we can learn from these word use
patterns.
We are also studying the variation in use of words relating to
PERMA (Positive emotion, engagement, relationships,
meaning, and accomplishment), and how these correlate with Gallup poll
answers
and CDC data at the State level.
Sub-questions involve studying how to
- best compute and visualize the words and phrases predictive of
personality and well-being
- develop and use lexicons for e.g. PERMA, given the fundamental
ambiguity of language
- build predictive models combining labeled messages (from mechanical
turkers) with person level labels
And, of course, to understand the underlying psychology questions.
For more information
A large set of papers are all available
at wwbp.org, are are interactive demos
