Extracting Human Temporal Orientation from Facebook Language

Abstract

People vary widely in their temporal orientation-how often they emphasize the past, present, and future-and this affects their finances, health, and happiness. Traditionally, temporal orientation has been assessed by self-report questionnaires. In this paper, we develop a novel behavior-based assessment using human language on Facebook. We first create a past, present, and future message classifier, engineering features and evaluating a variety of classification techniques. Our message classifier achieves an accuracy of 71.8%, compared with 52.8% from the most frequent class and 58.6% from a model based entirely on time expression features. We quantify a users' overall temporal orientation based on their distribution of messages and validate it against known human correlates: conscientiousness, age, and gender. We then explore social scientific questions, finding novel associations with the factors openness to experience, satisfaction with life, depression, IQ, and one's number of friends. Further, demonstrating how one can track orientation over time, we find differences in future orientation around birthdays.

‘Personality in its Natural Habitat’ Revisited: A Pooled, Multi–sample Examination of the Relationships between the Big Five Personality Traits and Daily Behaviour and Language Use

“…lack of visual information from photo or video Sherman, Rauthmann, Brown, Serfass, & Jones, 2015) and (ii) extracted via coding and text analysis from the raw ambient sounds (Kaplan et al, 2018). Future research should build on our analyses, which used LIWC to get at linguistic markers of the Big Five by employing more computationally advanced, bottom‐up text analysis methods (n‐grams and topic models) that can reveal subtle language patterns that escape dictionary‐based approaches (Iliev, Dehghani, & Sagi, 2015; Schwartz et al, 2015).…”

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“…Further, Schwartz et al (2015) show that the temporal orientation of messages (emphasizing the past, present, or future) may be swayed by factors like openness to new experiences, number of friends, satisfaction with life, or depression. -Content from popular or "expert" users differs from regular users' content.…”

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“…The use of language is even shaped by the relations among users, Burke et al [2013] showing how mothers and fathers use language differently when they speak with their daughters and sons, and vice versa. Further, Schwartz et al [2015] show that the temporal orientation of messages (emphasizing on the past, present, or future) may be swayed by factors like openness to experience, number of friends, satisfaction with life, or depression.…”