Life is not Always Depressing: Exploring the Happy Moments of People Diagnosed with Depression

Ana-Maria Bucur, Adrian Cosma, Liviu P. Dinu


Abstract
In this work, we explore the relationship between depression and manifestations of happiness in social media. While the majority of works surrounding depression focus on symptoms, psychological research shows that there is a strong link between seeking happiness and being diagnosed with depression. We make use of Positive-Unlabeled learning paradigm to automatically extract happy moments from social media posts of both controls and users diagnosed with depression, and qualitatively analyze them with linguistic tools such as LIWC and keyness information. We show that the life of depressed individuals is not always bleak, with positive events related to friends and family being more noteworthy to their lives compared to the more mundane happy events reported by control users.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.444
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4186–4192
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.444
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ana-Maria Bucur, Adrian Cosma, and Liviu P. Dinu. 2022. Life is not Always Depressing: Exploring the Happy Moments of People Diagnosed with Depression. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4186–4192, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Life is not Always Depressing: Exploring the Happy Moments of People Diagnosed with Depression (Bucur et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.444.pdf
Data
HappyDB