Language about the future on social media as a novel marker of anxiety and depression: A big-data and experimental analysis.

ABSTRACT: Anxiety and depression negatively impact many. Studies suggest depression is associated with future time horizons, or how "far" into the future people tend to think, and anxiety is associated with temporal discounting, or how much people devalue future rewards. Separate studies from linguistics and economics have shown that how people refer to future time predicts temporal discounting. Yet no one-that we know of-has investigated whether future time reference habits are a marker of anxiety and/or depression. We introduce the FTR classifier, a novel classification system researchers can use to analyse linguistic temporal reference. In Study 1, we used the FTR classifier to analyse data from the social-media website Reddit. Users who had previously posted popular contributions to forums about

SUBMITTER: Robertson C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10308542 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature