Twitter has proven that negative emotions lead to heart disease

    imageA group of researchers from various fields of science (psychology, computer science, medicine) from the universities of Pennsylvania and Melbourne published the article " Psychological Language on Twitter Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality " in the journal Psycological Science, which assesses the ability to predict the level of cardiovascular diseases in level of regions of the country using Twitter. As it turned out, the long-known fact that negative emotions directly affect a person’s health turned out to be true if one approached its verification even with the help of social networks.

    The researchers did the following: they analyzed 148 million tweets written in 1347 different regions of the United States, highlighting signs of negative emotions in them. Such were swear words, references to negative facts (catastrophe, crime, illness), complaints about lack of sleep, just marker words indicating the depressed state of the author of the tweet. The results of the study were geographically distributed on a specially created map.

    The researchers obtained the real geographic distribution of cardiovascular diseases from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and compared it with the obtained “tweet map”. As it turned out, both cards match very well:

    image

    As a result, a logical conclusion was made that negative emotions, often an expression of depression, really lead to serious health problems, and this was confirmed using a very wide and voluntary statistical sample. It is also interesting to note that the authors noted the difference in the age of the average Twitter user and the age at which heart disease is already becoming a very common problem. The average age of a Twitter user is 35 years old, while those over 60 years old are already considered potentially dangerous in terms of heart disease. The difference, as the researchers suggested, is still due to the fact that negative emotions are due to the general mood in the family and society, which still affects the person.

    Also popular now: