When are We Worried? Temporal Trends of Anxiety and What They Reveal about Us
Saif M. Mohammad
TL;DR
The paper investigates when people express anxiety on social media by leveraging the WorryWords lexicon and the TUSC Twitter corpus to quantify anxiety signals across time and focus types. It shows a robust diurnal pattern with peak anxiety around 8am and a noon lull, plus a midweek peak, and demonstrates that past-tense language associates with higher anxiety while future-tense language aligns with more calmness. Pronoun usage reveals higher anxiety in third-person and subject-pronoun contexts, highlighting how self- vs. outward-focus relates to anxious expression. These findings provide baseline insights for cross-domain and cross-language analyses and offer practical implications for real-time public-health monitoring and understanding cultural variations in anxiety expression.
Abstract
In this short paper, we make use of a recently created lexicon of word-anxiety associations to analyze large amounts of US and Canadian social media data (tweets) to explore *when* we are anxious and what insights that reveals about us. We show that our levels of anxiety on social media exhibit systematic patterns of rise and fall during the day -- highest at 8am (in-line with when we have high cortisol levels in the body) and lowest around noon. Anxiety is lowest on weekends and highest mid-week. We also examine anxiety in past, present, and future tense sentences to show that anxiety is highest in past tense and lowest in future tense. Finally, we examine the use of anxiety and calmness words in posts that contain pronouns to show: more anxiety in 3rd person pronouns (he, they) posts than 1st and 2nd person pronouns and higher anxiety in posts with subject pronouns (I, he, she, they) than object pronouns (me, him, her, them). Overall, these trends provide valuable insights on not just when we are anxious, but also how different types of focus (future, past, self, outward, etc.) are related to anxiety.