Dataset Information

Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach.

ABSTRACT: We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase 'sick of' and the word 'depressed'), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive 'my' when mentioning their 'wife' or 'girlfriend' more often than females use 'my' with 'husband' or 'boyfriend'). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality.

SUBMITTER: Schwartz HA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3783449 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach.

Schwartz H Andrew HA Eichstaedt Johannes C JC Kern Margaret L ML Dziurzynski Lukasz L Ramones Stephanie M SM Agrawal Megha M Shah Achal A Kosinski Michal M Stillwell David D Seligman Martin E P ME Ungar Lyle H LH

PloS one 20130925 9

We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psycho ...[more]

PMID: 24086296

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundStrong associations between infant vocabulary and school-age language and literacy skills would have important practical and theoretical implications: Preschool assessment of vocabulary skills could be used to identify children at risk of reading and language difficulties, and vocabulary could be viewed as a cognitive foundation for reading. However, evidence to date suggests predictive ability from infant vocabulary to later language and literacy is low. This study provides an investigation into, and interpretation of, the magnitude of such infant to school-age relationships.MethodsThree hundred British infants whose vocabularies were assessed by parent report in the 2nd year of life (between 16 and 24 months) were followed up on average 5 years later (ages ranged from 4 to 9 years), when their vocabulary, phonological and reading skills were measured.ResultsStructural equation modelling of age-regressed scores was used to assess the strength of longitudinal relationships. Infant vocabulary (a latent factor of receptive and expressive vocabulary) was a statistically significant predictor of later vocabulary, phonological awareness, reading accuracy and reading comprehension (accounting for between 4% and 18% of variance). Family risk for language or literacy difficulties explained additional variance in reading (approximately 10%) but not language outcomes.ConclusionsSignificant longitudinal relationships between preliteracy vocabulary knowledge and subsequent reading support the theory that vocabulary is a cognitive foundation of both reading accuracy and reading comprehension. Importantly however, the stability of vocabulary skills from infancy to later childhood is too low to be sufficiently predictive of language outcomes at an individual level - a finding that fits well with the observation that the majority of 'late talkers' resolve their early language difficulties. For reading outcomes, prediction of future difficulties is likely to be improved when considering family history of language/literacy difficulties alongside infant vocabulary levels.

Dataset Information

Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach.

Publications

Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets