Measuring Well-Being Using Social Media

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook provide a rich, if imperfect portal onto people's lives. We analyze tens of millions of Facebook posts and billions of tweets to study variation in language use with age, gender, personality, and mental and physical well-being. Word clouds visually illustrate the big five personality traits (e.g., "What is it like to be neurotic?"), while correlations between language use and county level health data suggest connections between health and happiness, including potential psychological causes of heart disease. Similar analyses are useful in many fields.