title: PREDICTING INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA.
abstract: We present the task of predicting individual well-being, as measured by a life satisfaction scale, through the language people use on social media. Well-being, which encompasses much more than emotion and mood, is linked with good mental and physical health. The ability to quickly and accurately assess it can supplement multi-million dollar national surveys as well as promote whole body health. Through crowd-sourced ratings of tweets and Facebook status updates, we create message-level predictive models for multiple components of well-being. However, well-being is ultimately attributed to people, so we perform an additional evaluation at the user-level, finding that a multi-level cascaded model, using both message-level predictions and userlevel features, performs best and outperforms popular lexicon-based happiness models. Finally, we suggest that analyses of language go beyond prediction by identifying the language that characterizes well-being.
authors.affiliation: Stony Brook University, Computer Science, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA.
authors.forename: H Andrew
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Schwartz
authors.forename: Maarten
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sap
authors.forename: Margaret L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Kern
authors.forename: Johannes C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Eichstaedt
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kapelner
authors.forename: Megha
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Agrawal
authors.forename: Eduardo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Blanco
authors.forename: Lukasz
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Dziurzynski
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Stillwell
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kosinski
authors.forename: Martin E P
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Seligman
authors.forename: Lyle H
authors.initials: LH
authors.lastname: Ungar
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008960:Models, Psychological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010549:Personal Satisfaction; D061108:Social Media