Examining the Role of Mood Patterns in Predicting Self-Reported Depressive symptoms

Abstract

Researchers have explored automatic screening models as a quick way to identify potential risks of developing depressive symptoms. Most existing models include a person's mood as reflected on social media at a single point in time as one of the predictive variables. In this paper, we study the changes and transition in mood reflected on social media text over a period of one year using a mood profile. We used a subset of the "MyPersonality" Facebook data set that comprises users who have consented to and completed an assessment of depressive symptoms. The subset consists of 93,378 Facebook posts from 781 users. We observed less evidence of mood fluctuation expressed in social media text from those with low symptom measures compared to others with high symptom scores. Next, we leveraged a daily mood representation in Hidden Markov Models to determine its associations with subsequent self-reported symptoms. We found that individuals who have specific mood patterns are highly likely to have reported high depressive symptoms. However, not all of the high symptoms individuals necessarily displayed this characteristic, which indicates presence of potential subgroups driving these findings. Finally, we leveraged multiple mood representations to characterize levels of depressive symptoms with a logistic regression model. Our findings support the claim that for some people, derived mood from social media text can be a proxy of real-life mood, in particular depressive symptoms. Combining the mood representations with other proxy signals can potentially advance responsibly used semi-automatic screening procedures.

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Individual Differences in the Movement-Mood Relationship in Digital Life Data

“…One underlying assumption of this work is that posts on social media have some reflection of the emotional state, mood, or other transient psychological phenomena that a person is experiencing. There is some controversy about the extent and strength of this relationship, with some finding significant reflections of emotion and mood in daily language (e.g., posts on social media Chen et al, 2020) while others fail to find these relations (e.g., in everyday speech Sun et al, 2020).…”

It’s Not Just About Sad Songs: The Effect of Depression on Posting Lyrics and Quotes

“…Social media records provide psychologists with a novel way of examining mental illness symptoms [5,4]. Existing studies often focus on the emotional content written by the social media users themselves, which we refer to as "self-created Content" (SC) [15].…”

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