Happiness and Sadness in Adolescents’ Instagram Direct Messaging: A Neural Topic Modelling Approach

Abstract

We investigated the expressions of happiness and sadness in adolescents’ direct messages (DMs) on Instagram. Using neural topic modelling (BERTopic), we analyzed 211,778 DMs belonging to 96 adolescents, who donated data from 110 Instagram accounts. Results showed that (1) expressions of happiness were more than four times more prevalent than expressions of sadness; (2) the number of DMs containing expressions of happiness and sadness were highly correlated; (3) there are temporal trends in the expression of happiness and sadness in adolescents’ DMs and there are individual differences in these trends, and (4) there is no significant between- or within-person relationship between the number of messages containing expressions of happiness and sadness and adolescents’ well-being.

Parent-Adolescent Communication in a Digital World: A 100-Day Diary Study

“…Examination of text messages or chats would further enable the coding of parent solicitation and adolescent disclosure as well as using text analysis to gain a more detailed insight into topics of parent-adolescent online communication (see for a modeling example Verbeij et al, 2024).…”