Sadness and Anxiety Language in Reddit Messages Before and After Quitting a Job

Molly Ireland, Micah Iserman, Kiki Adams


Abstract
People globally quit their jobs at high rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet there is scant research about emotional trajectories surrounding voluntary resignations before or during that era. To explore long-term emotional language patterns before and after quitting a job, we amassed a Reddit sample of people who indicated resigning on a specific day (n = 7,436), each of whom was paired with a comparison user matched on posting history. After excluding people on the basis of low posting frequency and word count, we analyzed 150.3 million words (53.1% from 5,134 target users who indicated quitting) using SALLEE, a dictionary-based syntax-aware tool, and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries. Based on posts in the year before and after quitting, people who had quit their jobs used more sadness and anxiety language than matched comparison users. Lower rates of “I” pronouns and cognitive processing language were associated with less sadness and anxiety surrounding quitting. Emotional trajectories during and before the pandemic were parallel, though pandemic messages were more negative. The results have relevance for strategic self-distancing as a means of regulating negative emotions around major life changes.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.41
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
467–478
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.41
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.41
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Molly Ireland, Micah Iserman, and Kiki Adams. 2023. Sadness and Anxiety Language in Reddit Messages Before and After Quitting a Job. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 467–478, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sadness and Anxiety Language in Reddit Messages Before and After Quitting a Job (Ireland et al., WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.41.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.41.mp4