Word use, personality and well-being

The words people use on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Google search queries are a rich, if imperfect, source of information about their personality and psychological state. We are developing methods to estimate variation in subjective well-being over time and space from social media word use. For example, we are characterizing how word use in Facebook posts varies as a function of age, sex, IQ, personality (OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), and subjective well-being and what we can learn from these word use patterns. We are also studying the variation in use of words relating to PERMA (Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment), and how these correlate with Gallup poll answers and CDC data at the State level.

Sub-questions involve studying how to

And, of course, to understand the underlying psychology questions.

For more information

A large set of papers are all available at wwbp.org, are are interactive demos