The results of a study in which scientists were predicting a depression for the posts of the users of social network Facebook, has published the journal ProceedingsoftheNationalAcademyofsciences.
Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) stated that identifying depression in users of social networks it is possible in advance. In particular, six months before the official diagnosis of depression can be predicted with an accuracy of 62%, for the three months – with an accuracy of 72%, this is evidenced by the results of this investigation.
The authors of the project for 2.5 years analyzed open user accounts network Facebook (most of these authors had accumulated 683). In particular, the researchers studied the peculiarity of the vocabulary in the records of the people, as well as the frequency and volume of texts that are geotagged. The scientists were able to verify that individuals who are prone to depression, use in their posts a lot of emotional words whereas people without depression often describe events neutrally. In addition, depression regularly write about health, and not necessarily in a negative aspect.
Recently, the German experts from the Institute of neurobiology and cognitive Sciences max Planck in Leipzig have established that in the long depression can change the brain structure. They found that depressed people increases the size of the hypothalamus, which impairs their analytical skills.
Earlier Magicforum wrote about the fact that depression can affect a person’s about the same as dementia.