Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since Mar 14, 2018)
Date Submitted: Dec 22, 2017
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 26, 2017 - Mar 14, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
An Exploration of Eating Disorders and Emotional States: An Infodemiological Study of Tweets Among Followers of Pro-Eating Disorder Sites
Background:
Studies have shown that individuals with eating disorders (ED) often suffer from negative emotional arousal as well. Increasingly, studies have been utilizing social media as a tool to better understanding public health issues.
Objective:
The aim of the study was to explore whether Twitter users who show signs of ED also show signs of negative emotional states and can be identified by their tweets.
Methods:
Using the Twitter API, six pro-ED Twitter accounts were identified. Twenty-percent of account followers were randomly extracted and screened for ED-related content (N=2139). Tweets from identified followers were analyzed using LIWC and MALLET to test for signs of depression. Machine learning was used to build a model to classify individuals as having an eating disorder or not based on the language used in their Tweets.
Results:
Twitter users with ED mentioned terms related to negative emotions, anxiety, anger, and sadness significantly more often than non-ED Twitter users; they also mentioned terms related to positive emotion less often. It was found that word clusters formed by ED users’ tweets were related to negative arousal and self-harm. It was also determined that people with eating disorders can be accurately classified using machine learning (sensitivity: 0.89, specificity: 0.94, positive predictive value: 0.94, negative predictive value: 0.88).
Conclusions:
Users who show signs of ED on Twitter also show signs of negative emotions on Twitter, and models induced with machine learning can accurately differentiate those with eating disorders from those without.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.