Within and Between-Person Differences in Language Used Across Anxiety Support and Neutral Reddit Communities

Abstract

Although many studies have distinguished between the social media language use of people who do and do not have a mental health condition, within-person context-sensitive comparisons (for example, analyzing individuals' language use when seeking support or discussing neutral topics) are less common. Two dictionary-based analyses of Reddit communities compared (1) anxious individuals' comments in anxiety support communities (e.g., /r/PanicParty) with the same users' comments in neutral communities (e.g., /r/todayilearned), and, (2) within popular neutral communities, comments by members of anxiety subreddits with comments by other users. Each comparison yielded theory-consistent effects as well as unexpected results that suggest novel hypotheses to be tested in the future. Results have relevance for improving researchers' and practitioners' ability to unobtrusively assess anxiety symptoms in conversations that are not explicitly about mental health.

Do Models of Mental Health Based on Social Media Data Generalize?

“…Research leveraging text data for mental health status classification has primarily only considered a constrained form of domain transfer. In a withinsubject analysis, Ireland and Iserman (2018) examined differences in language usage by Reddit users who had posted in an anxiety support forum within and outside mental health forums. Similarly, Wolohan et al (2018) explored the predictive power of models trained to detect depression within Reddit users as a function of access to text from explicit mental health related subreddits.…”

“…While these heuristics are useful for identifying candidates to include within each dataset, they also risk introducing bias that may render the modeling task trivial. For example, individuals who disclose a depression diagnosis are likely to also share their experience with other psychiatric conditions (Benton et al, 2017b), while language used in dedicated mental-health subreddits systematically differs from the rest of Reddit (De Choudhury and De, 2014;Ireland and Iserman, 2018).…”

Free Speech and Safe Spaces: How Moderation Policies Shape Online Discussion Spaces

“…Each comment body was processed as a separate file. As the category percentages would be especially high for short comments, I excluded all comments with a word count less than 10 from the data set (following Ireland & Iserman, 2018).…”

Utilizing Instagram Data to Identify Usage Patterns Associated With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

“…Instagram is a popular social media platform that has gained traction especially amongst adolescents and young adults (25)the age groups most at risk for the emergence of SSD. Despite its popularity, the majority of prior research to date has focused on text based platforms such as Facebook (26,27), Twitter (21,28), or Reddit (29,30). Contrary to these other popular networks, Instagram's primary focus is on images and videos as opposed to text (31).…”

“…The majority of prior work, aiming to explore associations between mental health status and social media activity, has been limited by relying primarily on data from individuals with presumed psychiatric conditions, without the ability to validate the disclosure or diagnosis (38,39). For example, self-disclosures based on specific disease related terms or statements that have been mentioned by platform users (21,23,40) or affiliation with mental health related communities (29,30). Further, social media use of individuals with SSD has been studied little compared to other psychiatric conditions, such as depression, and research has mainly focused on linguistic analysis (39).…”