Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.

Honey: Chemical composition, stability and authenticity.

Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it facilitates data collection by storing detailed records of its users' demographic profiles, social interactions, and behaviors. With participants' consent, these data can be recorded retrospectively in a convenient, accurate, and inexpensive way. Based on our experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining multiple Facebook-based psychological studies that attracted over 10 million participants, we demonstrate how to recruit participants using Facebook, incentivize them effectively, and maximize their engagement. We also outline the most important opportunities and challenges associated with using Facebook for research, provide several practical guidelines on how to successfully implement studies on Facebook, and finally, discuss ethical considerations.

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Facebook as a research tool for the social sciences: Opportunities, challenges, ethical considerations, and practical guidelines.

The ubiquity of social media provides a rich opportunity to enhance the data available to mental health clinicians and researchers, enabling a better-informed and better-equipped mental health field. We present analysis of mental health phenomena in publicly available Twitter data, demonstrating how rigorous application of simple natural language processing methods can yield insight into specific disorders as well as mental health writ large, along with evidence that as-of-yet undiscovered linguistic signals relevant to mental health exist in social media. We present a novel method for gathering data for a range of mental illnesses quickly and cheaply, then focus on analysis of four in particular: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder (SAD). We intend for these proof-of-concept results to inform the necessary ethical discussion regarding the balance between the utility of such data and the privacy of mental health related information.

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Quantifying Mental Health Signals in Twitter

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past two decades, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artifical intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of nlp, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.

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Survey of the state of the art in natural language generation: core tasks, applications and evaluation

We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality.

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Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach

Objective: We present a new open language analysis approach that identifies and visually summarizes the dominant naturally occurring words and phrases that most distinguished each Big Five personal...

The online social self: An open vocabulary approach to personality.

Social scientists are increasingly using the vast amount of text available on social media to measure variation in happiness and other psychological states. Such studies count words deemed to be indicators of happiness and track how the word frequencies change across locations or time. This word count approach is simple and scalable, yet often picks up false signals, as words can appear in different contexts and take on different meanings. We characterize the types of errors that occur using the word count approach, and find lexical ambiguity to be the most prevalent. We then show that one can reduce error with a simple refinement to such lexica by automatically eliminating highly ambiguous words. The resulting refined lexica improve precision as measured by human judgments of word occurrences in Facebook posts.

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Choosing the Right Words: Characterizing and Reducing Error of the Word Count Approach

This paper is written to compare two well-being movements: positive psychology and the self-help movement as modeled by Anthony Robbins, a well-known self-help, motivational and empowerment guru, author and speaker who has been internationally popular since the 1980s. This paper will analyze both theories of well-being and associated interventions that lead to more well-being from both schools of thought, including a case study analysis of an intervention conducted by Anthony Robbins at one of his seminars. The author seeks to create a bridge between the two fields and propose future research directions using positive psychology as the framework for measurement and analysis of Anthony Robbins’ interventions and techniques.

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Stephanie M. Ramones

Papers

Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach

The online social self: An open vocabulary approach to personality.

Choosing the Right Words: Characterizing and Reducing Error of the Word Count Approach

Unleashing the Power: Anthony Robbins, Positive Psychology, and the Quest for Human Flourishing