Negative expressions on tweets increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and desire of self-appeal decreased well-being

Tsukuba, Japan—Previous research has shown that it is possible to predict Twitter users' personalities and mental health by analyzing their social network and word statistics information. Our research team recently investigated the correlation between university students' social skills, tweets and retweets, emotional expressions, and types of topics and their subjective well-being. The results showed that students who used fewer negative expressions had higher levels of subjective well-being, and there was a positive correlation between topics such as social events and personal hobbies and subjective well-being. However, topics such as politics were negatively correlated with subjective well-being.

This study conducted a survey targeting university students enrolled in the Kanto Region, Japan, and investigated the relationship between their personality traits, including generalized trust, self-consciousness, and friendship, and their desire for self-presentation and subjective well-being including the effects of their online communication skills. Furthermore, we analyzed the Twitter log data of these users from January 2019 to June 2021 using natural language processing. We analyzed the data according to their grades and compared different groups based on the types of social media they used. The results showed that the number of tweets and retweets increased overall; the ratio of positive sentences decreased slightly, whereas the proportion of negative sentences increased slightly. In addition, compared with the students who used other types of social media, those who used only Twitter had the lowest levels of subjective well-being, and their desire for self-appeal decreased their levels of subjective well-being.

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This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21H03770 (principal investigator: Dr. Shaoyu Ye).
 

_{Original Paper}

Title of original paper:
Relationship between university students' emotional expression on tweets and subjective well-being: Considering the effects of their self-presentation and online communication skills

Journal:
BMC Public Health

DOI:
10.1186/s12889-023-15485-2

_{Correspondence}

Associate Professor YE, Shaoyu
Institute of Library, Information and Media Science, University of Tsukuba

_{Related Link}

Institute of Library, Information and Media Science