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

Molly Ireland, Micah Iserman

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.
Anthology ID:
W18-0620
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, LA
Editors:
Kate Loveys, Kate Niederhoffer, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Rebecca Resnik, Philip Resnik
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
182–193
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0620
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0620
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Molly Ireland and Micah Iserman. 2018. Within and Between-Person Differences in Language Used Across Anxiety Support and Neutral Reddit Communities. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic, pages 182–193, New Orleans, LA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Within and Between-Person Differences in Language Used Across Anxiety Support and Neutral Reddit Communities (Ireland & Iserman, CLPsych 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/W18-0620.pdf
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