Night Music: Layla

Language Exposes An Up-Coming Breakup

In a fascinating piece of social science, researchers at Princeton University have analyzed the language used on social media posts by those going through a romantic breakup. They discovered that:

“Language markers can detect impending relationship breakups up to 3 mo before they occur, with continued psychological aftereffects lasting 6 mo after the breakup. Because the language shifts are also apparent in subreddits (forums) unrelated to relationships, the research points to the pervasive impact personal upheavals have across people’s social worlds.”

The researchers studied 1,027,541 posts from 6,803 Reddit users who had posted about their breakups.

“Signs included an increase in I-words, we-words, and cognitive processing words (characteristic of depression, collective focus, and the meaning-making process, respectively) and drops in analytic thinking (indicating more personal and informal language). The patterns held even when people were posting to groups unrelated to breakups and other relationship topics. People who posted about their breakup for longer time periods were less well-adjusted a year after their breakup compared to short-term posters. 

The ubiquity and accessibility of social media in western culture, especially, is making study of the written corpus a valuable new tool in social science. However, you can be sure that intelligence agencies and corporations are also analyzing us in the same way. Just like with mobile phones, convenience always comes at the cost of privacy.