Language on Social Media Provides Warning Signs of Depression Symptoms: Study

Over the past several decades, advances in computer text analysis have enabled researchers to ascertain patterns in motivation, mood, and other psychological variables by categorizing and tallying the frequency of certain words. For instance, over a decade ago, psychologist James Pennebaker developed a method in his book “The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us” for counting positive and negative emotion words in texts to understand authors’ mental states.