根据宾夕法尼亚大学研究人员的一项新研究，Twitter可用于预测冠心病。通过研究宣布婚姻和离婚，斗争和成就的推文，可以预测社区的心理健康和预防心脏病。
压力，吸烟和低收入都可以增加心脏病的风险，Twitter提供了有关这些生活方式因素的大量信息。可以通过检查特定地区的推文来发展单个社区的整体心理感觉。研究人员长期以来一直怀疑社区的普遍心理氛围对心脏病风险产生了深远的影响。但是，在给定时间和位置量化当地的时代精神是具有挑战性的。 Twitter可以提供一种在健康模型中表达公众感觉的方法。
发现表达希望和乐观情绪的推文与所检查社区中心脏病的风险较低有关。压力，疲劳和愤怒与较高的冠心病率有关。
"Psychological states have long been thought to have an effect on coronary heart disease. For example, hostility and depression have been linked with heart disease at the individual level through biological effects. But negative emotions can also trigger behavioral and social responses; you are also more likely to drink, eat poorly and be isolated from other people which can indirectly lead to heart disease," Margaret Kern of the University of Melbourne in Australia said.
传统上，通过使用居民进行的调查来判断社区的心理健康。但是，该方法有几个缺陷，可以通过对Twitter帖子的分析来解决。调查不仅昂贵且耗时，而且数据仅限于列表中的问题。取而代之的是，研究人员研究了寻找诸如“学习”，“会议”和“管理”之类的单词的推文，它们表达了积极的感觉。将这些与表达无聊，疲劳和发誓的单词进行了比较，与负面情绪相关。
"Imagine you go through a town that you don't know and you get a recording of all the traffic signs, the road signs, the menus, and then you start getting conversations between people, even though you might not know anything about the town. It would tell you a lot. Any single tweet probably has close to zero information, but that times a billion is a lot," Johannes Eichstaedt, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
进一步的研究正在研究个人的抑郁及其与Facebook状态更新的关系。 Eichstaedt和他的团队还将Twitter帖子与美国前15名死亡原因的事件进行了比较。
Twitter在心脏病的预测中可能扮演的角色的调查是详细的在日记中心理科学。
