Identifying Psychological Symptoms Based on Facial Movements

Depression prediction based on LassoNet-RNN model: A longitudinal study

Depression has become a widespread health concern today. Understanding the influencing factors can promote human mental health as well as provide a basis for exploring preventive measures. Combining LassoNet with recurrent neural network (RNN), this study constructed a screening model ,LassoNet-RNN, for identifying influencing factors of individual depression. Based on multi-wave surveys of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) dataset (11,661 observations), we analyzed the multivariate time series data and recognized 27 characteristic variables selected from four perspectives: demographics, health-related risk factors, household economic status, and living environment. Additionally, the importance rankings of the characteristic variables were obtained. These results offered insightful recommendations for theoretical developments and practical decision making in public health.

Sensing Psychological Well-being Using Social Media Language: Prediction Model Development Study

BACKGROUND

Positive mental health is arguably increasingly important and can be revealed, to some extent, in terms of psychological well-being (PWB). However, PWB is difficult to assess in real time on a large scale. The popularity and proliferation of social media make it possible to sense and monitor online users' PWB in a nonintrusive way, and the objective of this study is to test the effectiveness of using social media language expression as a predictor of PWB.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to investigate the predictive power of social media corresponding to ground truth well-being data in a psychological way.

METHODS

We recruited 1427 participants. Their well-being was evaluated using 6 dimensions of PWB. Their posts on social media were collected, and 6 psychological lexicons were used to extract linguistic features. A multiobjective prediction model was then built with the extracted linguistic features as input and PWB as the output. Further, the validity of the prediction model was confirmed by evaluating the model's discriminant validity, convergent validity, and criterion validity. The reliability of the model was also confirmed by evaluating the split-half reliability.

RESULTS

The correlation coefficients between the predicted PWB scores of social media users and the actual scores obtained using the linguistic prediction model of this study were between 0.49 and 0.54 (P<.001), which means that the model had good criterion validity. In terms of the model's structural validity, it exhibited excellent convergent validity but less than satisfactory discriminant validity. The results also suggested that our model had good split-half reliability levels for every dimension (ranging from 0.65 to 0.85; P<.001).

CONCLUSIONS

By confirming the availability and stability of the linguistic prediction model, this study verified the predictability of social media corresponding to ground truth well-being data from the perspective of PWB. Our study has positive implications for the use of social media to predict mental health in nonprofessional settings such as self-testing or a large-scale user study.

Identifying Chinese social media users' need for affect from their online behaviors

The need for affect (NFA), which refers to the motivation to approach or avoid emotion-inducing situations, is a valuable indicator of mental health monitoring and intervention, as well as many other applications. Traditionally, NFA has been measured using self-reports, which is not applicable in today's online scenarios due to its shortcomings in fast, large-scale assessments. This study proposed an automatic and non-invasive method for recognizing NFA based on social media behavioral data. The NFA questionnaire scores of 934 participants and their social media data were acquired. Then we run machine learning algorithms to train predictive models, which can be used to automatically identify NFA degrees of online users. The results showed that Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) performed best among several algorithms. The Pearson correlation coefficients between predicted scores and NFA questionnaire scores achieved 0.25 (NFA avoidance), 0.31 (NFA approach) and 0.34 (NFA total), and the split-half reliabilities were 0.66-0.70. Our research demonstrated that adolescents' NFA can be identified based on their social media behaviors, and opened a novel way of non-intrusively perceiving users' NFA which can be used for mental health monitoring and other situations that require large-scale NFA measurements.

Questionnaires based on natural language processing elicit immersive ruminative thinking in ruminators: Evidence from behavioral responses and EEG data

Rumination is closely related to mental disorders and can thus be used as a marker of their presence or a predictor of their development. The presence of masking and fabrication in psychological selection can lead to inaccurate detection of psychological disorders. Human language is considered crucial in eliciting specific conscious activities, and the use of natural language processing (NLP) in the development of questionnaires for psychological tests has the potential to elicit immersive ruminative thinking, leading to changes in neural activity. Electroencephalography (EEG) is commonly used to detect and record neural activity in the human brain and is sensitive to changes in brain activity. In this study, we used NLP to develop a questionnaire to induce ruminative thinking and then recorded the EEG signals in response to the questionnaire. The behavioral results revealed that ruminators exhibited higher arousal rates and longer reaction times, specifically in response to the ruminative items of the questionnaire. The EEG results showed no significant difference between the ruminators and the control group during the resting state; however, a significant alteration in the coherence of the entire brain of the ruminators existed while they were answering the ruminative items. No differences were found in the control participants while answering the two items. These behavioral and EEG results indicate that the questionnaire elicited immersive ruminative thinking, specifically in the ruminators. Therefore, the questionnaire designed using NLP is capable of eliciting ruminative thinking in ruminators, offering a promising approach for the early detection of mental disorders in psychological selection.

Automatic anxiety recognition method based on microblog text analysis

Mental health has traditionally been assessed using a self-report questionnaire. Although this approach produces accurate results, it has the disadvantage of being labor-intense and time-consuming. This study aimed to extract original text information published by users on the social media platform (Sina Weibo). A machine learning method was used to train the model and predict the anxiety state of the user automatically. Data of 1,039 users were collected. First, Weibo users were invited to fill the anxiety self-assessment scale. All original text data ever published by the users were collected. Second, the Simplified Chinese-Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (SC-LIWC) were extracted for feature selection and model training. We found that the model achieved the best performance when the XGBoostRegressor algorithm was used. The Pearson correlation coefficient between the model predicted scores and self-reported scores was moderate (r = 0.322). In addition, we tested the reliability of the model, and found that the model had high reliability (r = 0.72). The experimental results further showed that the model was feasible and effective and could use the digital footprints to predict psychological characteristics.

How social media expression can reveal personality

Background

Personality psychology studies personality and its variation among individuals and is an essential branch of psychology. In recent years, machine learning research related to personality assessment has started to focus on the online environment and showed outstanding performance in personality assessment. However, the aspects of the personality of these prediction models measure remain unclear because few studies focus on the interpretability of personality prediction models. The objective of this study is to develop and validate a machine learning model with domain knowledge introduced to enhance accuracy and improve interpretability.

Methods

Study participants were recruited via an online experiment platform. After excluding unqualified participants and downloading the Weibo posts of eligible participants, we used six psycholinguistic and mental health-related lexicons to extract textual features. Then the predictive personality model was developed using the multi-objective extra trees method based on 3,411 pairs of social media expression and personality trait scores. Subsequently, the prediction model's validity and reliability were evaluated, and each lexicon's feature importance was calculated. Finally, the interpretability of the machine learning model was discussed.

Results

The features from Culture Value Dictionary were found to be the most important predictors. The fivefold cross-validation results regarding the prediction model for personality traits ranged between 0.44 and 0.48 (p < 0.001). The correlation coefficients of five personality traits between the two "split-half" datasets data ranged from 0.84 to 0.88 (p < 0.001). Moreover, the model performed well in terms of contractual validity.

Conclusion

By introducing domain knowledge to the development of a machine learning model, this study not only ensures the reliability and validity of the prediction model but also improves the interpretability of the machine learning method. The study helps explain aspects of personality measured by such prediction models and finds a link between personality and mental health. Our research also has positive implications regarding the combination of machine learning approaches and domain knowledge in the field of psychiatry and its applications to mental health.

Prediction model of interaction anxiousness based on Weibo data

Adolescents who face social distress in real life are often accompanied by interaction anxiousness. To avoid direct social activities, they prefer to indulge in social networks to satisfy their psychological needs for interpersonal communication. Sina Weibo, China's leading social media platform, has a markedly young user base. It provides a rich sample of adolescents with interaction anxiousness and conditions for real-time monitoring. In this study, various word categories, such as perception of spatial distance and positional relationships, morality, and emotion, showed a significant relationship with interaction anxiousness. Furthermore, prediction models were established based on the original Weibo data of 839 active Sina Weibo users through a variety of machine learning algorithms to predict the scores of users' interaction anxiousness. The results showed that the performance of the prediction model established by the fully connected neural network was the best, and both criterion validity and split-half reliability were good (r _{criterionvalidity} = 0.30, r _{split - halfreliability} = 0.76). This study confirms the validity of the prediction model of interaction anxiousness based on social media behavior data, provides a feasible solution to examine adolescents' interaction anxiousness, and provides a scientific basis for more targeted mental health interventions.

Automatic Decision-Making Style Recognition Method Using Kinect Technology

In recent years, somatosensory interaction technology, represented by Microsoft's Kinect hardware platform, has been widely used in various fields, such as entertainment, education, and medicine. Kinect technology can easily capture and record behavioral data, which provides new opportunities for behavioral and psychological correlation analysis research. In this paper, an automatic decision-style recognition method is proposed. Experiments involving 240 subjects were conducted to obtain face data and individual decision-making style score. The face data was obtained using the Kinect camera, and the decision-style score were obtained via a questionnaire. To realize automatic recognition of an individual decision-making style, machine learning was employed to establish the mapping relationship between the face data and a scaled evaluation of the decision-making style score. This study adopts a variety of classical machine learning algorithms, including Linear regression, Support vector machine regression, Ridge regression, and Bayesian ridge regression. The experimental results show that the linear regression model returns the best results. The correlation coefficient between the linear regression model evaluation results and the scale evaluation results was 0.6, which represents a medium and higher correlation. The results verify the feasibility of automatic decision-making style recognition method based on facial analysis.

Mental states and personality based on real-time physical activity and facial expression recognition

INTRODUCTION

To explore a quick and non-invasive way to measure individual psychological states, this study developed interview-based scales, and multi-modal information was collected from 172 participants.

METHODS

We developed the Interview Psychological Symptom Inventory (IPSI) which eventually retained 53 items with nine main factors. All of them performed well in terms of reliability and validity. We used optimized convolutional neural networks and original detection algorithms for the recognition of individual facial expressions and physical activity based on Russell's circumplex model and the five factor model.

RESULTS

We found that there was a significant correlation between the developed scale and the participants' scores on each factor in the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) and Big Five Inventory (BFI-2) [r = (-0.257, 0.632), p < 0.01]. Among the multi-modal data, the arousal of facial expressions was significantly correlated with the interval of validity (p < 0.01), valence was significantly correlated with IPSI and SCL-90, and physical activity was significantly correlated with gender, age, and factors of the scales.

DISCUSSION

Our research demonstrates that mental health can be monitored and assessed remotely by collecting and analyzing multimodal data from individuals captured by digital tools.