Internet-based identification of anxiety in university students using text and facial emotion analysis

Anxiety in university students can lead to poor academic performance and even dropout. The Adult Manifest Anxiety Scale (AMAS-C) is a validated measure designed to assess the level and nature of anxiety in college students.

The aim of this study is to provide internet-based alternatives to the AMAS-C in the automated identification and prediction of anxiety in young university students. Two anxiety prediction methods, one based on facial emotion recognition and the other on text emotion recognition, are described and validated using the AMAS-C Test Anxiety, Lie and Total Anxiety scales as ground truth data.

The first method analyses facial expressions, identifying the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and the neutral expression, while the students complete a technical skills test. The second method examines emotions in posts classified as positive, negative and neutral in the students' profile on the social network Facebook. Both approaches aim to predict the presence of anxiety.

Both methods achieved a high level of precision in predicting anxiety and proved to be effective in identifying anxiety disorders in relation to the AMAS-C validation tool. Text analysis-based prediction showed a slight advantage in terms of precision (86.84 %) in predicting anxiety compared to face analysis-based prediction (84.21 %).

The applications developed can help educators, psychologists or relevant institutions to identify at an early stage those students who are likely to fail academically at university due to an anxiety disorder.