How enthusiastic reviews of a city on the Internet can hide depression A very interesting and very important article for digital anthropology, "The risk of depression associated with the expression of idealized feelings about urban places in social networks", was recently published in the most prestigious scientific journal on urbanism, Nature's Cities. It is devoted to how to correctly interpret reviews of the city and individual city places left by social network users. For a long time, it was customary to interpret such reviews in a very simple way, dividing them into two categories: positive and negative. Moreover, it is implied that these feelings can be used to assess a person's sense of self in the city. If he criticizes anything on social media, it means that he feels uncomfortable in the city and experiences depression, stress and negativity. And if a person actively praises the city, then it is clear that he is satisfied and happy with everything. But nothing like that! It turned out that everything is much more complicated. A team of social researchers from Wuhan University (China) conducted a large-scale digital study and found that deep depression often hides behind the passionate admiration of urban beauty. The scope of the project is absolutely amazing. The researchers first recruited two samples of anonymous contributors from the Chinese microblogging network Sina Weibo: the first group included 3,711 users with a confirmed clinical diagnosis of depression, and the second included a control group of 19,526 healthy individuals. Then they extracted the entire set of posts from all these people over several years (over 780 thousand posts in total!) and using neural networks analyzed what the users there wrote about various objects in the city (88 types: from gas stations to cultural centers). At the same time, they analyzed the emotional orientation of these posts using a special LooM index, which reveals not only positive/negative, but also a more complex palette of emotions. Well, the result turned out to be sensational.

How enthusiastic reviews of a city on the Internet can hide depression A very interesting and very important article for digital anthropology, "The risk of depression associated with the expression of idealized feelings about urban places in social networks", was recently published in the most prestigious scientific journal on urbanism, Nature's Cities. It is devoted to how to correctly interpret reviews of the city and individual city places left by social network users. For a long time, it was customary to interpret such reviews in a very simple way, dividing them into two categories: positive and negative. Moreover, it is implied that these feelings can be used to assess a person's sense of self in the city. If he criticizes anything on social media, it means that he feels uncomfortable in the city and experiences depression, stress and negativity. And if a person actively praises the city, then it is clear that he is satisfied and happy with everything. But nothing like that! It turned out that everything is much more complicated. A team of social researchers from Wuhan University (China) conducted a large-scale digital study and found that deep depression often hides behind the passionate admiration of urban beauty. The scope of the project is absolutely amazing. The researchers first recruited two samples of anonymous contributors from the Chinese microblogging network Sina Weibo: the first group included 3,711 users with a confirmed clinical diagnosis of depression, and the second included a control group of 19,526 healthy individuals. Then they extracted the entire set of posts from all these people over several years (over 780 thousand posts in total!) and using neural networks analyzed what the users there wrote about various objects in the city (88 types: from gas stations to cultural centers). At the same time, they analyzed the emotional orientation of these posts using a special LooM index, which reveals not only positive/negative, but also a more complex palette of emotions. Well, the result turned out to be sensational.