Posted on 03/03/2022 12:38:48 PM PST by Red Badger
Dartmouth researchers have built an artificial intelligence model for detecting mental disorders using conversations on Reddit, part of an emerging wave of screening tools that use computers to analyze social media posts and gain an insight into people's mental states.
What sets the new model apart is a focus on the emotions rather than the specific content of the social media texts being analyzed. In a paper presented at the 20th International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, the researchers show that this approach performs better over time, irrespective of the topics discussed in the posts.
There are many reasons why people don't seek help for mental health disorders—stigma, high costs, and lack of access to services are some common barriers. There is also a tendency to minimize signs of mental disorders or conflate them with stress, says Xiaobo Guo, Guarini '24, a co-author of the paper. It's possible that they will seek help with some prompting, he says, and that's where digital screening tools can make a difference.
"Social media offers an easy way to tap into people's behaviors," says Guo. The data is voluntary and public, published for others to read, he says.
Reddit, which offers a massive network of user forums, was their platform of choice because it has nearly half a billion active users who discuss a wide range of topics. The posts and comments are publicly available, and the researchers could collect data dating back to 2011.
In their study, the researchers focused on what they call emotional disorders—major depressive, anxiety, and bipolar disorders—which are characterized by distinct emotional patterns. They looked at data from users who had self-reported as having one of these disorders and from users without any known mental disorders.
They trained their model to label the emotions expressed in users' posts and map the emotional transitions between different posts, so a post could be labeled "joy," "anger," "sadness," "fear," "no emotion," or a combination of these. The map is a matrix that would show how likely it was that a user went from any one state to another, such as from anger to a neutral state of no emotion.
Different emotional disorders have their own signature patterns of emotional transitions. By creating an emotional "fingerprint" for a user and comparing it to established signatures of emotional disorders, the model can detect them. To validate their results, they tested it on posts that were not used during training and show that the model accurately predicts which users may or may not have one of these disorders.
This approach sidesteps an important problem called "information leakage" that typical screening tools run into, says Soroush Vosoughi, assistant professor of computer science and another co-author. Other models are built around scrutinizing and relying on the content of the text, he says, and while the models show high performance, they can also be misleading.
For instance, if a model learns to correlate "COVID" with "sadness" or "anxiety," Vosoughi explains, it will naturally assume that a scientist studying and posting (quite dispassionately) about COVID-19 is suffering from depression or anxiety. On the other hand, the new model only zeroes in on the emotion and learns nothing about the particular topic or event described in the posts.
While the researchers don't look at intervention strategies, they hope this work can point the way to prevention. In their paper, they make a strong case for more thoughtful scrutiny of models based on social media data. "It's very important to have models that perform well," says Vosoughi, "but also really understand their working, biases, and limitations."
Explore further
Can emoji use be the key in detecting remote-work burnout?
More information:
Xiaobo Guo, Yaojia Sun, Soroush Vosoughi, Emotion-based Modeling of Mental Disorders on Social Media. arXiv:2201.09451v1 [cs.SI], arxiv.org/pdf/2201.09451.pdf
God hating leftists, silly.
Well don't let it loose on us!
If they give it a FB account it will go nuts.................
Pure horseshyt. The DSM4 is political garbage and any computer program to detect non-existent disorders is garbage too.
:)
Reddit is definitely the place to look for mental disorders.
And then respond to the AI’s finding.
Will the AI analyze the content of our posts on FR to determine we are crazy?
Or will it just correlate posting on FR with insanity?
Since liberalism is a mental disorder...
Studying what comes out in writing from Dartmouth to academe and to its alumni, one can see with sadness that the campus fell deep into the narrow confines of being asleep at the wheel - known by the paradoxical, cynical, double speak adjective, “woke”! This “research” fails to peed behind rthe realities of today’s hugely censorious, one-sided, politicized, propaganda-driven online world.
COULD THIS EMOTIONLESS CONTENT BE FLAGGED AS AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE????!!!! :( :(
I would love to turn that loose on my web posts just see how whacked it thinks I am!
Field day on FR!!!
LOL...Putinistas are going to have a melt down!
Did they test it on Biden?
Part of the “social credit” system, I imagine.
LOL wonder what they would make of. a photo of a rabbit’s with a pancake on its head or dozens of post with one word,”Thailand”
90% of AI is BS. 100% of computer models are BS. Put them together in an “AI model” and you get something that works? And it won’t simply confirm the biases of the developer like every other computer model?
It’s been great knowing you guys. I’m going to shut up now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.