Psychological and Behavioral Insights From Social Media Users: Natural Language Processing-Based Quantitative Study...

Depression significantly impacts an individual's thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and moods; this prevalent mental health condition affects millions globally. Traditional approaches to detecting and treating depression rely on questionnaires and personal interviews, which can be time consuming and potentially inefficient. As social media has permanently shifted the pattern of our daily communications, social media postings can offer new perspectives in understanding mental illness in individuals because they provide an unbiased exploration of their language use and behavioral patterns.

This study aimed to develop and evaluate a methodological language framework that integrates psychological patterns, contextual information, and social interactions using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The goal was to enhance intelligent decision-making for detecting depression at the user level.

We extracted language patterns via natural language processing approaches that facilitate understanding contextual and psychological factors, such as affective patterns and personality traits linked with depression. Then, we extracted social interaction influence features. The resultant social interaction influence that users have within their online social group is derived based on users' emotions, psychological states, and context of communication extracted from status updates and the social network structure. We empirically evaluated the effectiveness of our framework by applying machine learning models to detect depression, reporting accuracy, recall, precision, and F₁-score using social media status updates from 1047 users along with their associated depression diagnosis questionnaire scores. These datasets also include user postings, network connections, and personality responses.

The proposed framework demonstrates accurate and effective detection of depression, improving performance compared to traditional baselines with an average improvement of 6% in accuracy and 10% in F₁-score. It also shows competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art models. The inclusion of social interaction features demonstrates strong performance. By using all influence features (affective influence features, contextual influence features, and personality influence features), the model achieved an accuracy of 77% and a precision of 80%. Using affective features and affective influence features also showed strong performance, achieving 81% precision and an F₁-score of 79%.

The developed framework offers practical applications, such as accelerating hospital diagnoses, improving prediction accuracy, facilitating timely referrals, and providing actionable insights for early interventions in mental health treatment plans.