Authors
Molly E Ireland, H Andrew Schwartz, Qijia Chen, Lyle H Ungar, Dolores Albarracín
Publication date
2015/12
Journal
Health Psychology
Volume
34
Issue
S
Pages
1252
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Description
Objective
Future orientation promotes health and well-being at the individual level. Computerized text analysis of a dataset encompassing billions of words used across the United States on Twitter tested whether community-level rates of future-oriented messages correlated with lower human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) rates and moderated the association between behavioral risk indicators and HIV.
Method
Over 150 million tweets mapped to US counties were analyzed using 2 methods of text analysis. First, county-level HIV rates (cases per 100,000) were regressed on aggregate usage of future-oriented language (eg, will, gonna). A second data-driven method regressed HIV rates on individual words and phrases.
Results
Results showed that counties with higher rates of future tense on Twitter had fewer HIV cases, independent of strong structural predictors of HIV such as population density. Future-oriented …
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