Dataset Information

Natural Language Processing Insight into LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Content Analysis of Anxiety-Provoking Topics and Trends in Emotion in LGBTeens Microcommunity Subreddit.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Widespread fear surrounding COVID-19, coupled with physical and social distancing orders, has caused severe adverse mental health outcomes. Little is known, however, about how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted LGBTQ+ youth, who disproportionately experienced a high rate of adverse mental health outcomes before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective

We aimed to address this knowledge gap by harnessing natural language processing methodologies to investigate the evolution of conversation topics in the most popular subreddit for LGBTQ+ youth.

Methods

We generated a data set of all r/LGBTeens subreddit posts (n=39,389) between January 1, 2020 and February 1, 2021 and analyzed meaningful trends in anxiety, anger, and sadness in the posts. Because the distribution of anxiety before widespread social distancing orders was meaningfully different from the distribution after (P<.001), we employed latent Dirichlet allocation to examine topics that provoked this shift in anxiety.

Results

We did not find any differences in LGBTQ+ youth anger and sadness before and after government-mandated social distancing; however, anxiety increased significantly (P<.001). Further analysis revealed a list of 10 anxiety-provoking topics discussed during the pandemic: attraction to a friend, coming out, coming out to family, discrimination, education, exploring sexuality, gender pronouns, love and relationship advice, starting a new relationship, and struggling with mental health.

Conclusions

During the COVID-19 pandemic, LGBTQ+ teens increased their reliance on anonymous discussion forums when discussing anxiety-provoking topics. LGBTQ+ teens likely perceived anonymous forums as safe spaces for discussing lifestyle stressors during COVID-19 disruptions (eg, school closures). The list of prevalent anxiety-provoking topics in LGBTQ+ teens' anonymous discussions can inform future mental health interventions in LGBTQ+ youth.

SUBMITTER: Stevens HR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8372845 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Emotions are signaled by complex arrays of face and body actions. The main point of contention in contemporary treatments is whether these arrays are discrete, holistic constellations reflecting emotion categories, or whether they are compositional-comprised of smaller components, each of which contributes some aspect of emotion to the complex whole. We address this question by investigating spontaneous face and body displays of athletes and place it in the wider context of human communicative signals and, in particular, of language. A defining property of human language is compositionality-the ability to combine and recombine a relatively small number of elements to create a vast number of complex meaningful expressions, and to interpret them. We ask whether this property of language can be discerned in a more ancient communicative system: intense emotional displays. In an experiment, participants interpreted a range of emotions and their strengths in pictures of athletes who had just won or lost a competition. By matching participants' judgements with minutely coded features of face and body, we find evidence for compositionality. The distribution of participants' responses indicates that most of the athletes' face and body features contribute to displays of dominance or submission. More particular emotional components related, for example, to positive valence (e.g. happy) or goal obstruction (e.g. frustrated), were also found to significantly correlate with certain face and body features. We propose that the combination of features linked to broader components (i.e, dominant or submissive) and to more particular emotions (e.g, happy or frustrated) reflects more complex emotional states. In sum, we find that the corporeal expression of intense, unfiltered emotion has compositional properties, potentially providing an ancient scaffolding upon which, millions of years later, the abstract and constrained compositional system of human language could build.