14 DAY TRIAL // Each and every day, millions of people take to Twitter to share their thoughts, feeling and experiences. While those happy with their life compose optimistic tweets, those dealing with stress, exhaustion or anger post negative messages.
A new study in the journal Psychological Science says that, by analyzing these tweets, it is possible to get an accurate picture of the psychological wellbeing of one community or another. What's interesting is that, apparently, this information can help predict heart disease rates.
As explained by scientists with the University of Pennsylvania, it's not just bad habits like smoking and drinking that make people more vulnerable to heart disease. On the contrary, psychological issues such as stress or anger also take their toll on a person's cardiovascular system.
What this means is that, by using Twitter to get an idea of what mood people living in a given region are in, specialists can predict heart disease rates. Essentially, they can tell how likely to experience cardiovascular trouble a person might be by looking at their tweets and those posted by people living nearby.
Mind you, this is not just theoretical talk. On the contrary, the University of Pennsylvania specialists behind these claims have already used Twitter to make observations about heart disease rates in various regions across the country.
More precisely, the researchers looked at health data and tweets from 1,300 counties and found a strong correlation between negative emotional language and topics and increased heart disease risk. This association remained even when variables like income and lifestyle were factored in.
In light of these findings, the researchers argue that it might not be such a bad idea if future studies concerning public health in the US focused not just on actual medical data but also on information social media platforms like Twitter can offer.
