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Does Social Media Behaviors Reflect Users’ Anxiety? A Case Study of Twitter Activities

Authors:
Tian Wang
Masooda Bashir

Keywords: Social media behaviors; Mental health; Data analytics.

Abstract:
Anxiety has been a common mental health disorder that affects many people, especially young adults, but it is often undetected or untreated. Meanwhile, mental health professionals and services available are insufficient for the assessment and treatment of mental illnesses, including anxiety, due to cost, availability, and other factors. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new approaches for mental healthcare services. Considering that the number of young adults using social media has increased significantly in the last decade, data from social media activities could possibly be a new approach for individual’s mental health assessment. In this study, we recruited 95 participants and examined their Twitter activities to learn if young adults’ social media activities are relevant to their anxiety level. Twitter activities were assessed between two groups of users, namely, those participants who reported symptoms, and participants reporting few or no anxiety symptoms. Our preliminary results show that certain social media behaviors differ for individuals that report anxiety symptoms and those with less or no symptoms of anxiety. Results from this study could be beneficial for both researchers and mental health professionals as a supplemental source of information and could potentially provide a new approach for mental health assessment and treatment in the future.

Pages: 8 to 13

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: October 18, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2326-9294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-832-7

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from October 18, 2020 to October 22, 2020