Dynamics of Emotion Expression in Tweets Are Associated With Depression and Anxiety

Mental health can influence both the intensity and dynamics of emotion expression. For example, persistent and intense negative emotions are symptoms of depression and anxiety. Such patterns could reflect maladaptive or impaired emotion regulation. Researching the relationships between the dynamics of emotion expression and mental health can improve our understanding of the experiences that characterize these conditions and help inform their prevention and treatment. Many previous studies rely on self-reports of emotion, a limitation that could be addressed by assessing emotion expression in social media posts. We used Twitter (now “X”) data, from 2020 to 2022, and gold-standard questionnaire measures of mental health from 230 adult participants in a U.K. longitudinal study to explore the relationships between the dynamics of emotion expression in tweets and mental health. We compared results generated using three different sentiment analysis methods. We found evidence that posting tweets that expressed more positive and less negative emotions was associated with reduced symptoms of anxiety. Expressing positive emotions at a greater variability was also associated with reduced anxiety symptoms in our participants. There was much less evidence that variability in negative emotions and instability in any emotion were associated with mental health. Mood disorders, such as anxiety, may be characterized by more negative emotions and a reduced ability to respond to positive internal and external stimuli.