“Text Mining in Psychology”

Abstract

Text is omnipresent in our daily lives. Reading the latest news in the morning, writing emails at work, or chatting with friends via messengers – digitalization revolutionized the production, storage, and dissemination of textual communication. With the advent of social media, vast amounts of digital footprints such as comments, status posts, or Tweets became publicly available. This represents both an opportunity and challenge for psychological research: On the one hand, collecting natural language unobtrusively is very appealing, as it offers the chance to unveil an author's psychological characteristics. For instance, researchers were able to infer personality traits, mental health, or job performance from textual analysis. On the other hand, the growing volume, velocity, and often very unstructured nature of such text corpora demand analysis techniques beyond traditional human coding.