Expression of Psychological Distress on Instagram Using Hashtags in Russian and English: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

People have been using images to express ideas, share stories, and communicate since early history. The advent of social media has made sharing images an important part of everyday life. Among other things, social networks can be used to express psychological distress; however, research on this topic is limited. The goal of this study was to explore representations of psychological distress in the Russian-speaking segment of Instagram. The study involved contrasting images labeled with hashtags in Russian with images marked by analogous Anglophone hashtags in a data set of 1,512 images. Quantitative content analysis revealed significant differences between images labeled with Russian and Anglophone hashtags. Images containing depictions of texts were significantly less frequent among images with Russian hashtags, while inanimate object depictions were more prevalent. Hashtags for fear in both languages were related not to psychological distress but to the "scary" in popular culture. Images of alcohol were associated with stress hashtags in both languages and with hashtag for depression in Russian only. Images of food were significantly more prevalent among images with Russian hashtag for stress. Current study highlights the need for culturally and linguistically appropriate online mental health interventions.

Food and social media: a research stream analysis

“…Behav 6 Bountress et al ( 2021 ) Eur. J. Psychotraumatol 5 Kircaburun et al ( 2021 ) Psychiatry Investig 5 Bogolyubova et al ( 2018 ) SAGE Open 5 *Further keywords (sorted by decreasing FL): sensitivity; scale; use; mental; covid-19; event …”

Reflective functioning and personal recovery process of users with borderline personality disorder on Instagram: an explorative study using computerized and thematic analysis

“…Therefore, social media platforms can allow access to a subjectively constructed view of phenomena like PR in people with mental illness (Lamarre & Rice, 2017). For example, Instagram is a popular image based social network site (SSN) launched in 2010; Instagram-based research has been increasing over the past few years, and studies of mental health-related issues on these platforms has become more frequent (Bogolyubova, Upravitelev, Churilova, & Ledovaya, 2018). Instagram is currently the most popular social network among young people, with a slight majority of female users (Bogolyubova et al, 2018).…”

“…For example, Instagram is a popular image based social network site (SSN) launched in 2010; Instagram-based research has been increasing over the past few years, and studies of mental health-related issues on these platforms has become more frequent (Bogolyubova, Upravitelev, Churilova, & Ledovaya, 2018 ). Instagram is currently the most popular social network among young people, with a slight majority of female users (Bogolyubova et al , 2018 ). Posts on Instagram are based on static images such as selfies (Boursier & Manna, 2018 ) or short videos, which the user may accompany by text and/or hashtags: words preceded by “#” used to categorize the content of the post.…”

Social Media-based Research of Interpersonal and Group Communication in Russia

“…The main problem of this research, similar to Yakushev and Mityagin (2014), is that the training set of users with depression propensity is compiled of those who contributed to discussion threads on being suicidal in depression-and suiciderelated VK communities. This problem may be resolved in two different ways: by either collecting ground truth on psychological conditions outside social media, as in Panicheva et al (2016) or by using social media data not as an indicator of "true" psychological condition but as a source of users' selfrepresentations, as in Bogolyubova et al (2018).…”

“…An interesting extension of this research is presented in Bogolyubova et al (2018) where the authors relate users' linguistic behavior, their psychological traits and the propensity to engage in harmful online behavior. They find out that one of the dark triad components-psychopathy-is the best predictor of such behavior.…”