Lyle Ungar
University of Pennsylvania

Measuring Psychological Traits using Social Media

The words and images people post on social media such as Twitter and Facebook
provide a rich, if imperfect, view of who they are and what they care about.  We
analyze tens of millions of Facebook posts and tens of billions of tweets to
study variation in language use with age, gender, personality, and mental and
physical well-being.  Word clouds visually illustrate the big five personality
traits (e.g., ""What is it like to be neurotic?""), while correlations between
language use and county-level health data suggest connections between health and
happiness, including potential psychological causes of heart disease.  Similar
analyses are increasingly being used for applications ranging from job candidate
screening to targeted marketing.