The Effect of User Psychology on the Content of Social Media Posts: Originality and Transitions Matter.

Multiple studies suggest that frequencies of affective words in social media text are associated with the user's personality and mental health. In this study, we re-examine these associations by looking at the transition patterns of affect. We analyzed the content originality and affect polarity of 4,086 posts from 70 adult Facebook users contributed over 2 months. We studied posting behavior, including silent periods when the user does not post any content. Our results show that more extroverted participants tend to post positive content continuously and that more agreeable participants tend to avoid posting negative content. We also observe that participants with stronger depression symptoms posted more non-original content. We recommend that transitions of affect pattern derived from social media text and content originality should be considered in further studies on mental health, personality, and social media.

Inspecting Vulnerability to Depression From Social Media Affect.

Affect describes a person's feelings or emotions in reaction to stimuli, and affective expressions were found to be related to depression in social media. This study examined the longitudinal pattern of affect on a popular Chinese social media platform: Weibo. We collected 1,664 Chinese Weibo users' self-reported CES-D scores via surveys and 3 years' worth of Weibo posts preceding the surveys. First, we visualized participants' social media affect and found evidence of cognitive vulnerability indicated by affect patterns: Users with high depression symptoms tended to use not only more negative affective words but also more positive affective words long before they developed early depression symptoms. Second, to identify the type of language that is directly predictive of depression symptoms, we observed ruminations from users who experienced specific life events close to the time of survey completion, and we found that: increased use of negative affective words on social media posts, together with the presence of specific stressful life events, increased a person's risk of developing high depression symptoms; and meanwhile, though tending to focus on negative attributes, participants also incorporated problem-solving skills in their ruminations. These findings expand our understanding of social media affect and its relationship with individuals' risks of developing depression symptoms.