IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0187278.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Building a profile of subjective well-being for social media users

Author

Listed:
  • Lushi Chen
  • Tao Gong
  • Michal Kosinski
  • David Stillwell
  • Robert L Davidson

Abstract

Subjective well-being includes ‘affect’ and ‘satisfaction with life’ (SWL). This study proposes a unified approach to construct a profile of subjective well-being based on social media language in Facebook status updates. We apply sentiment analysis to generate users’ affect scores, and train a random forest model to predict SWL using affect scores and other language features of the status updates. Results show that: the computer-selected features resemble the key predictors of SWL as identified in early studies; the machine-predicted SWL is moderately correlated with the self-reported SWL (r = 0.36, p

Suggested Citation

  • Lushi Chen & Tao Gong & Michal Kosinski & David Stillwell & Robert L Davidson, 2017. "Building a profile of subjective well-being for social media users," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(11), pages 1-15, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0187278
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187278
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187278
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187278&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0187278?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas T. Hills & Eugenio Proto & Daniel Sgroi & Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe, 2019. "Historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing using millions of digitized books," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 3(12), pages 1271-1275, December.
    2. Ed Diener, 1994. "Assessing subjective well-being: Progress and opportunities," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 31(2), pages 103-157, February.
    3. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Jeremy Hunter, 2003. "Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 185-199, June.
    4. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Addendum: Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(5), pages 768-768, November.
    5. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(2), pages 301-320, April.
    6. H Andrew Schwartz & Johannes C Eichstaedt & Margaret L Kern & Lukasz Dziurzynski & Stephanie M Ramones & Megha Agrawal & Achal Shah & Michal Kosinski & David Stillwell & Martin E P Seligman & Lyle H U, 2013. "Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(9), pages 1-16, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fisch, Christian & Block, Jörn H., 2021. "How does entrepreneurial failure change an entrepreneur's digital identity? Evidence from Twitter data," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 36(1).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro & Svitlana Volkova & Vasileios Lampos & Yoram Bachrach & Nikolaos Aletras, 2015. "Studying User Income through Language, Behaviour and Affect in Social Media," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(9), pages 1-17, September.
    2. Tutz, Gerhard & Pößnecker, Wolfgang & Uhlmann, Lorenz, 2015. "Variable selection in general multinomial logit models," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 207-222.
    3. Oxana Babecka Kucharcukova & Jan Bruha, 2016. "Nowcasting the Czech Trade Balance," Working Papers 2016/11, Czech National Bank.
    4. Carstensen, Kai & Heinrich, Markus & Reif, Magnus & Wolters, Maik H., 2020. "Predicting ordinary and severe recessions with a three-state Markov-switching dynamic factor model," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 829-850.
    5. Hou-Tai Chang & Ping-Huai Wang & Wei-Fang Chen & Chen-Ju Lin, 2022. "Risk Assessment of Early Lung Cancer with LDCT and Health Examinations," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(8), pages 1-12, April.
    6. Margherita Giuzio, 2017. "Genetic algorithm versus classical methods in sparse index tracking," Decisions in Economics and Finance, Springer;Associazione per la Matematica, vol. 40(1), pages 243-256, November.
    7. Nicolaj N. Mühlbach, 2020. "Tree-based Synthetic Control Methods: Consequences of moving the US Embassy," CREATES Research Papers 2020-04, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    8. Wang, Qiao & Zhou, Wei & Cheng, Yonggang & Ma, Gang & Chang, Xiaolin & Miao, Yu & Chen, E, 2018. "Regularized moving least-square method and regularized improved interpolating moving least-square method with nonsingular moment matrices," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 325(C), pages 120-145.
    9. Yi-Ching Hsieh & Hung-Chang Chiu & Yun-Chia Tang & Wei-Yun Lin, 2018. "Does Raising Value Co-creation Increase All Customers’ Happiness?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 152(4), pages 1053-1067, November.
    10. Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy & Adrian S. Lewis, 2018. "Error Bounds, Quadratic Growth, and Linear Convergence of Proximal Methods," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 43(3), pages 919-948, August.
    11. Mkhadri, Abdallah & Ouhourane, Mohamed, 2013. "An extended variable inclusion and shrinkage algorithm for correlated variables," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 631-644.
    12. Lucian Belascu & Alexandra Horobet & Georgiana Vrinceanu & Consuela Popescu, 2021. "Performance Dissimilarities in European Union Manufacturing: The Effect of Ownership and Technological Intensity," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(18), pages 1-19, September.
    13. Candelon, B. & Hurlin, C. & Tokpavi, S., 2012. "Sampling error and double shrinkage estimation of minimum variance portfolios," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 511-527.
    14. Susan Athey & Guido W. Imbens & Stefan Wager, 2018. "Approximate residual balancing: debiased inference of average treatment effects in high dimensions," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 80(4), pages 597-623, September.
    15. Andrea Carriero & Todd E. Clark & Massimiliano Marcellino, 2022. "Specification Choices in Quantile Regression for Empirical Macroeconomics," Working Papers 22-25, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    16. Kim, Hyun Hak & Swanson, Norman R., 2018. "Mining big data using parsimonious factor, machine learning, variable selection and shrinkage methods," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 339-354.
    17. Shuichi Kawano, 2014. "Selection of tuning parameters in bridge regression models via Bayesian information criterion," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 55(4), pages 1207-1223, November.
    18. Yize Zhao & Matthias Chung & Brent A. Johnson & Carlos S. Moreno & Qi Long, 2016. "Hierarchical Feature Selection Incorporating Known and Novel Biological Information: Identifying Genomic Features Related to Prostate Cancer Recurrence," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 111(516), pages 1427-1439, October.
    19. Enrico Bergamini & Georg Zachmann, 2020. "Exploring EU’s Regional Potential in Low-Carbon Technologies," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(1), pages 1-28, December.
    20. Qianyun Li & Runmin Shi & Faming Liang, 2019. "Drug sensitivity prediction with high-dimensional mixture regression," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(2), pages 1-18, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0187278. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.