Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN) have developed a new early warning system for loneliness to prevent long-term consequences such as depression or dementia.
To do this, they simply search through a person's Twitter messages and analyze the content using linguistic models. Initial tests have shown that lonely people post almost twice as much on average, and they tend to do so at night.
“Reliable and accurate data”
“Loneliness is a slow killer because some of the medical problems associated with it may not manifest themselves until decades later. If we could identify and support lonely people before the resulting health problems become truly noticeable, we would have a real chance of helping them. This could have very far-reaching consequences for public health.”
says Sharath Chandra Guntuku, principal investigator at UPENN 's Perelman School of Medicine .
By defining typical topics and other linguistic features that are published on online media such as Twitter, the researcher and her team managed to create a kind of early warning system for loneliness.
“Social media has the potential to allow scientists and physicians to passively measure loneliness over time.”
says co-study author Rachelle Schneider. An analysis of tweets provides “very reliable and accurate data”.
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Anger, depression and fear
As part of their project, the UPENN experts first searched all Twitter messages from users in Pennsylvania who have a publicly accessible account on the portal for specific keywords such as “lonely” or “alone”. This made it possible to identify 6,202 users who had used these terms more than five times in the study period between 2012 and 2016. When compared with a control group of people who were proven not to suffer from loneliness, it was found that lonely users were almost twice as active.
Using various linguistic analysis models, the researchers also found that lonely people on Twitter were more likely than average to show strong emotions such as anger, depression or fear. “In many cases, the messages posted also allowed concrete conclusions to be drawn about relationship problems, drug abuse and difficulties in dealing with one’s own feelings,” as Guntuku reports.
Source: press text
Article images: Shutterstock / By Jack Frog
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