When are We Worried? Temporal Trends of Anxiety and What They Reveal about Us
This work provides incremental insights into anxiety trends for social media researchers and psychologists, but does not address a broader societal problem.
The paper analyzed temporal patterns of anxiety in US and Canadian social media data, finding that anxiety peaks at 8am and is lowest at noon, is highest mid-week and lowest on weekends, and varies with tense and pronoun usage, such as being highest in past tense sentences and third-person pronouns.
In this short paper, we make use of a recently created lexicon of word-anxiety associations to analyze large amounts of US and Canadian social media data (tweets) to explore *when* we are anxious and what insights that reveals about us. We show that our levels of anxiety on social media exhibit systematic patterns of rise and fall during the day -- highest at 8am (in-line with when we have high cortisol levels in the body) and lowest around noon. Anxiety is lowest on weekends and highest mid-week. We also examine anxiety in past, present, and future tense sentences to show that anxiety is highest in past tense and lowest in future tense. Finally, we examine the use of anxiety and calmness words in posts that contain pronouns to show: more anxiety in 3rd person pronouns (he, they) posts than 1st and 2nd person pronouns and higher anxiety in posts with subject pronouns (I, he, she, they) than object pronouns (me, him, her, them). Overall, these trends provide valuable insights on not just when we are anxious, but also how different types of focus (future, past, self, outward, etc.) are related to anxiety.