Using Twitter proved that negative emotions lead to heart disease.

A group of researchers from various fields of science (psychology, computer science, medicine) from the universities of Pennsylvania and Melbourne published the article " Psychological Science in the journal Psychological Science on Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality " regional level of the country using Twitter. As it turned out, the long-known fact that negative emotions directly affect a person’s health turned out to be true if one approached checking it, even with the help of social networks.

The researchers did the following: they analyzed 148 million tweets written in 1,347 different regions of the United States, highlighting signs of negative emotions. Such were swear words, mentions of negative facts (catastrophes, crimes, illnesses), complaining about lack of sleep, just words-markers, indicating the depressive state of the author of tweet. The results of the study were geographically distributed over a specially created map.

The real geographical distribution of cardiovascular diseases was obtained by researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and compared with the resulting “tweet map”. As it turned out, both cards match very well:


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As a result, a logical conclusion was made that negative emotions, often expressing depression, do lead to serious health problems, and this was confirmed with the help of a very broad and voluntary statistical sample. It is interesting to note the fact that the authors noted the difference in the age of the average Twitter user and the age at which heart diseases already become a very frequent problem. The average age of a Twitter user is 35 years, while those over 60 are already considered potentially dangerous in terms of heart disease. The difference, as the researchers suggested, is still due to the fact that negative emotions are caused by the general mood in the family and society, which still has an impact on the person.