Twitter contains the latest news, starts and interrupts careers, launches social movements and overthrows governments, according to an online edition for girls and women from 14 to 35 years old Pannochka. net All this thanks to direct and simple access to information and the ability to freely share with others what's in your head.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated that Twitter may have another interesting field of application: a social network can serve as an indicator of regions where everything is not well with cardiovascular diseases.
Previous scientific work has revealed many factors that affect the risk of cardiovascular diseases: low income, smoking, psychological stress, etc.. UPenn scientists were able to collect much more information about traditional risk factors and the emotional atmosphere in society, which is closely related to the risk of CVD. The main thing is to correctly interpret it.
Scientists say that the expression in Twitter of negative phenomena such as anger, stress, depression, fear, is associated with cardiovascular mortality in a particular region. On the other hand, positive emotions in messages in Twitter are associated with low cardiovascular risk.
The scientific world for a long time believed that the psychological well-being in the community is important for physical health, but the problem is that psychological well-being is difficult to measure in numbers. With the use of Twitter, a fantastic opportunity to quantify the psychological well-being in the region. Now, health authorities and local authorities can find out how effective their policies are in a particular city or county, and will act accordingly.
The study, whose results recently appeared in the journal Psychological Science, was organized by Johannes Eichstaedt, a graduate of the School of Science and Arts of the University of Pennsylvania. The co-authors of the work were X. Andrew Schwartz from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Margaret Kern from the University of Melbourne in Australia and a number of other scientists.
Today, in social networks, billions of users, under real and fictitious names, write about their thoughts and feelings, so the world of social media is a huge field of work for psychologists. Such data can be successfully used by specialists in the field of public health.
Since there is no way to directly measure the state of a person's inner world, scientists decided, by the tradition of psychology, to use the words that people use when communicating. Early studies have shown that linguistic analysis can be as useful as traditional questionnaires for human personality analysis.
"Obtaining data using questionnaires or surveys is an expensive and time-consuming process, but more importantly, you are limited to questions that are included in the questionnaire / questionnaire. You will never get that wealth of information that can be obtained by analyzing a person's speech, "writes Aikstedt.
If there is a link between the language and the emotional state, then there must be a connection between the language and the physical condition of people. First of all, we can talk about coronary insufficiency - a condition that is accompanied by a decrease or a complete cessation of blood flow in the arteries of the heart. This is the No. 1 killer in the world and an ideal candidate for such analysis.
"The psychological state affects the state of the coronary arteries. For example, hostility and depression are associated with a high risk of cardiovascular events. This can be caused by direct biological mechanisms (vasospasm), and can be caused by behavioral changes: a person in depression tends to drink more, eat wrong, be isolated from people, "explains Kern.
In the United States, health authorities consistently count the number of deaths caused by coronary insufficiency. They collect data on risk factors such as smoking, obesity, hypertension, lack of movement. This data for each county is available on official websites. Scientists have decided to predict cardiovascular mortality in their own way, via Twitter.
They collected texts of all available Twitter messages for 2009-2010 and automatically generated clusters of words that reflect the mood and behavior of the authors of messages.
With the help of "emotional dictionaries" scientists analyzed this huge array of words for 1,300 US districts, where 88% of the country's population live.
It was found that the frequency of using negative words such as "hate" (hate, hate), correlates with cardiovascular mortality in the district, even if we take into account the level of income and education. Positively stained words on Twitter, such as "friends" or "wonderful" (wonderful, wonderful), on the contrary, are associated with a lower mortality rate from CVD medbe. en.
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