by visiting professor Prof. Dr. Johan Bollen

Abstract

Social media platforms cater to a fundamental human need for social connections, but, surprisingly, their use may be associated with lower levels of individual well-being and increased incidence of mental health issues. When we extract longitudinal indicators of subjective well-being from the online language of hundreds of thousands of individuals and compare the results to their social relations, we observe a strong homophily of subjective well-being in online social networks. Most social media users nevertheless experience a situation in which their friends on average are more more popular and happier than they are, a so-called friendship and happiness paradox. When we analyze the language of tens of thousands of individuals before and after they report experiencing a strong emotion, we also observe how these emotions evolve over time at the resolution of individual minutes. Notably, valence levels rapidly return to baseline levels immediately after individuals put their feelings into words, suggesting the effects of individual emotion regulation strategies such as affect labeling. Combined these results suggest distinct pathways through which social media use may exert both its deleterious and beneficial effects on individual and social well-being. I will conclude with a brief overview of our present efforts to model the morbidity, online correlates, and longitudinal dynamics of mental health issues from large-scale social media data.