title: [A pilot study of differences in behavioral and linguistic characteristics between Sina suicide microblog users and Sina microblog users without suicide idea].
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To investigate how suicide microblog users in China "act" and "speak" differently from other microblog users without suicide idea.
  
  
  METHODS
  The suicide group consisted of 31 Chinese microblog users identified as suicide via online information provided by a Sina microblog user, and the control group consisted of 30 active microblog users without suicide idea screened by using suicide-related psychological scales. The differences in 10 microblog use behavioral characteristics and 88 linguistic characteristics between the suicide group and the control group were compared with normality test and rank sum test respectively.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In the behavioral characteristics, the suicide group used hyperlinks and "@" less frequently than the control group [0.04 (0.04) vs. 0.06 (0.04), P=0.029; 0.60 (0.27) vs. 0.69 (0.18), P=0.028], and was more self-focused [0.47 (0.25) vs. 0.30 (0.10), P=0.010]. In the linguistic characteristics, the suicide group showed less frequency in using measure word, work related word and apostrophe than the control group (P<0.05), and showed more frequency in using pronoun, personal pronoun, third person singular, non-specific pronoun, word expressing social experience, word expressing anxiety, word expressing exclusion, sexual word, religious word, second person singular, human being related word, negative emotion related word, anger related word, sadness or death related word (P<0.05).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Suicides seemed to interact less with others, showed more self-concern and more negative expressions, use more cognitively exclusive, death-related, religion-related words, and use less work-related words. The results of this study might be helpful for the research on suicide among netizen.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
authors.forename: Li
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Guan
authors.affiliation: University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
authors.forename: Bibo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.affiliation: Institute of Population Research, Peking University.
authors.forename: Tianli
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Hong Kong Jockey Club Center for Suicide Research and Prevention, the University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Qijin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: Hong Kong Jockey Club Center for Suicide Research and Prevention, the University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Paul Siu Fai
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Yip
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; Email: tszhu@psych.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Tingshao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zhu
mesh_terms: D057218:Blogging / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D002681:China; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010865:Pilot Projects; D013405:Suicide / Q000523:psychology*