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Understanding user communication around loneliness on online forums.

ABSTRACT: Increasingly, individuals experiencing loneliness are seeking support on online forums-some of which focus specifically on discussions around loneliness (loneliness forums); loneliness may influence how these individuals communicate in other online forums not focused on loneliness (non-loneliness forums). In order to provide effective and appropriate online interventions around loneliness, it is important to understand how users who publish posts in a loneliness forum communicate in the loneliness forum and non-loneliness forums they belong to. In this paper, using language features, the following analyses are conducted: (1) Posts published on an online loneliness forum on Reddit, /r/Lonely are compared to posts (published by the same users and around the same time period) on two Reddit online forums i.e. an advice seeking forum, /r/AskReddit and a forum focused on discussions around depression (depression forum), /r/depression. (2) Interventions related to loneliness may vary depending on if an individual is lonely and depressed or lonely but not depressed; language use differences in posts published in /r/Lonely by the following set of users are identified: (a) users who post in both /r/Lonely and a depression forum and (b) users who post in /r/Lonely but not in the depression forum. The findings from this work gain new insights, for example: (i) /r/Lonely users tend to seek advice/ask questions related to relationships in the advice seeking forum, /r/AskReddit and (ii) users who are members of the loneliness forum but not the depression forum tend to publish posts (on the loneliness forum) on topic themes related to work/job, however, those who are members of the loneliness and depression forums tend to use more words associated with anger, negation, death, and post on topic themes related to affection relative to relationships in their loneliness forum posts. Some of the findings from this work also align with prior work e.g. users who express loneliness in online forums tend to make more reference to self. These findings aid in gaining insights into how users communicate on these forums and their support needs, thereby informing loneliness interventions.

SUBMITTER: Andy A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8460046 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Teacher emotions are complex as emotions are unique to individuals, situated within specific contexts, and vary over time. This study contributed in synthesizing theories of the complexity in two characteristics of multi-dimensionality and dynamics. Further, we provided large-scale empirical evidence by employing big data and computational text analysis. The data contained around one million teachers' online posts from 2007 to 2018. It was scraped from three representative forums of teachers' workplace events and personal life occasions in a popular American teacher website. By conducting thread-level sentiment analysis in forums, we computed word-frequency-based eight discrete emotions ratios (i.e., anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust) and the degrees of sentiment polarity (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral). We then used latent Dirichlet allocation for topic classifications. These topics, proxies of contexts, covered a holistic range of teachers' real-life events. Some topics are in the main interest of scholars, such as teachers' professional development and students' behavioral management. This paper is also the first to include the less scholarly studied contexts like professional dressing advice and holiday choices. Then, we examined and visualized variations of emotions and sentiments across 30 topics along with three scales of time (i.e., calendar year, calendar month, and academic semesters). The results showed that teachers tended to have positive sentiments in the online professional community across the past decade, but all eight discrete emotions were presented. The compositions of the specific emotion types varied across topics and time. Regarding the topics of students' behavior issues, teachers' negative emotions' ratios were higher compared when it was presented in other topics. Their negative emotions also peaked during semesters. The forum of teachers' personal lives had positive emotions pronounced across topics and peaked during the wintertime. This paper summarized the evidenced multi-dimensionality characteristic with the multiple types of emotions as compositions and varying degrees of sentiment polarity of teachers. The dynamics characteristic is that teachers' emotions vary across contexts from their workplace to their personal lives and over time. These two characteristics of complexity also suggested potential interplay effects among emotions and across contexts over time.

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Understanding user communication around loneliness on online forums.

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