A psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin has developed software to analyze the language used on Twitter to determine a user's mental state.
AnalyzeWords is the brainchild of James W. Pennebaker, PhD, who developed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count system in 1993 to study language as related to psychology. AnalyzeWords allows the user to plug in a Twitter handle and receive an analysis of how that person is feeling based on the words he or she has used, according to the New Yorker.
Dr. Pennebaker is not the only one who has studied the effects of word use on health through social media. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia analyzed 826 million tweets from people across the country to isolate the regions with the highest incidence of cardiovascular disease. Tweets that had higher incidences of aggressive words had significantly higher rates of death from atherosclerotic heart disease, according to the report.
Social media language data can also be used to study individuals rather than communities. A Microsoft Research survey analyzed Tweets from people suffering from depression and created an index that could identify other users who were possibly depressed based on their social media posts, according to the report.