The Language of Positive Mental Health: Findings From a Sample of Russian Facebook Users

Abstract

Positive mental health is considered to be a significant predictor of health and longevity; however, our understanding of the ways in which this important characteristic is represented in users’ behavior on social networking sites is limited. The goal of this study was to explore associations between positive mental health and language used in online communication in a large sample of Russian Facebook users. The five-item World Health Organization Well-Being Index (WHO-5) was used as a self-report measure of well-being. Morphological, sentiment, and semantic analyses were performed for linguistic data. The total of 6,724 participants completed the questionnaire and linguistic data were available for 1,972. Participants’ mean age was 45.7 years ( SD = 11.6 years); 73.4% were female. The dataset included 15,281 posts, with an average of 7.67 ( SD = 5.69) posts per participant. Mean WHO-5 score was 60.0 ( SD = 19.1), with female participants exhibiting lower scores. Use of negative sentiment words and impersonal predicates (“should statements”) demonstrated an inverse association with the WHO-5 scores. No significant correlation was found between the use of positive sentiment words and the WHO-5 scores. This study expands current understanding of the association between positive mental health and language use in online communication by employing data from a non-Western sample.

Predicting subjective well-being in a high-risk sample of Russian mental health app users

“…Both SWB scores in our final sample are consistently lower than in other studies made on other groups of Russians. Thus, WHO-5 score amounts to the average of 0.46 ± 0.187 in our dataset against 0.60 ± 0.191 obtained in a study of Russian Facebook users [ 71 ], the only available evaluation of WHO-5 for Russia. Likewise, while the mean SWLS score among our participants is 18.3, a study on a sample close to the general Russian population (mean age 41 y.o.…”

“…Negative sentiment has been shown to correlate negatively with life satisfaction [ 34 , 53 , 84 ] and subjective well-being [ 71 ]. Negative sentiment in written or oral speech may also sometimes, although not always, be a manifestation of depressed mood, another symptom of depressive disorder according to DMS-5.…”

Identifying mental health discussion topic in social media community: subreddit of bipolar disorder analysis

“…Additionally, the analysis is limited to the specific dataset and platform analyzed, and sentiments expressed may vary across different social media platforms and online communities. For instance, using Twitter content analysis to measure attitudes toward mental illness and analyzing mental health based on the positive language of Facebook users provided different insights into online discussions about mental health (Reavley and Pilkington, 2014;Bogolyubova et al, 2020).…”