Tag: psychology

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Language in Tweets Offers Insight Into Community-level Well-being

In a Q&A, researcher Lyle Ungar discusses why counties that frequently use words like ‘love’ aren’t necessarily happier, plus how techniques from this work led to a real-time COVID-19 wellness map.

By Michele W. Berger

Lyle Ungar, Ph.D. (Photo: Eric Sucar)

People in different areas across the United States reacted differently to the threat of COVID-19. Some imposed strict restrictions, closing down most businesses deemed nonessential; others remained partially open.

Such regional distinctions are relatively easy to quantify, with their effects generally understandable through the lens of economic health. What’s harder to grasp is the emotional satisfaction and happiness specific to each place, a notion ’s has been working on for more than five years.

In 2017, the group published the , a free, interactive tool that displays characteristics of well-being by county based on Census data and billions of tweets. Recently, WWBP partnered with ’s Center for Digital Health to create a , which reveals in real time how people across the country perceive COVID-19 and how it’s affecting their mental health.

That map falls squarely in line with a paper published this week in the by computer scientist , one of the principal investigators of the World Well-Being Project, and colleagues from Stanford University, Stony Brook University, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Melbourne.

By analyzing 1.5 billion tweets and controlling for common words like “love” or “good,” which frequently get used to connote a missing aspect of someone’s life rather than a part that’s fulfilled, the researchers found they could discern subjective well-being at the county level. “We have a long history of collecting people’s language and asking people who are happier or sadder what words they use on Facebook and on Twitter,” Ungar says. “Those are mostly individual-level models. Here, we’re looking at community-level models.”

In a conversation with Penn Today, Ungar describes the latest work, plus how it’s useful in the time of COVID-19 and social distancing.

Read Ungar’s Q&A at .

Dr. Lyle Ungar is a Professor of Computer and Information Science and a member of the Department of Bioengineering Graduate Group.

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Five Tips to Stay Positive and Healthy During Social Isolation

Though the coronavirus situation is changing daily, even hourly, by now the need for physical separation from those not in your household is clear. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, says Penn psychologist Melissa Hunt.

“We’re social animals,” says Hunt, associate director of clinical training in Penn’s Psychology Department. “We have an entire neuroendocrine system that responds to touch and social proximity with people we care about, that contributes to our sense of well-being and connection in the world. Losing out on that is really hard.”

It’s also not something we’ve really been asked to do before, says Lyle Ungar, a Penn computer scientist who is part of the World Well-Being Project, an initiative that uses social media language to measure psychological well-being and physical health. “This is an experiment on a scale that we’ve never seen in the United States,” he says.

Ungar and Hunt offer some suggestions to stay positive and healthy in the face of this new social isolation.

1. Maintain a connection with the people you love, even if it can’t be a physical one. 

“Social distance does not mean no social contact,” Ungar says. Psychologically, face-to-face conversations are best, but right now they’re not likely possible. Instead, Ungar suggests video calls. “They’re second best in terms of emotional bonding,” he says. “Phone calls aren’t as good as video chats, and texting is even worse. But of course, being totally isolated is the worst.”

Read the full five tips at Penn Today. Media contact Michele W. Berger.

Melissa G. Hunt is the associate director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Lyle Ungar is a professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, in the Graduate Group in Genomics and Computational Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine, in the Department of Operations, Information, and Decisions in the Wharton School, and in the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences.