The Emotional Climate of Academia: Exploring Social Media Data as an Indicator of Well-Being

Sarah Marie Müller and André Bittermann ()
Additional contact information
Sarah Marie Müller: Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID)
André Bittermann: Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID)

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2025, vol. 26, issue 6, No 14, 24 pages

Abstract: Abstract Understanding and promoting researchers‘ well-being is crucial for successful research outcomes and a thriving scientific community. Traditional well-being assessments can be resource-intensive, but prior research suggests that sentiment analysis of social media text data can provide insights into the emotional well-being in the general population. In this proof-of-concept study, we explore whether social media sentiment can serve as an indicator of researchers‘ well-being on a group-level. Specifically, we analyze the emotional climate of the academic community by applying sentiment analysis to a dataset of more than 3.48 Million messages from 14,876 psychology researchers, posted on the platform Twitter/X between 2019 and 2021. As this period is one year before and after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, we used the findings from COVID-19 research to derive two hypotheses: lower well-being during the pandemic is reflected in more positive/less negative sentiment in researchers‘ social media posts (H1), and a stronger impact on female researchers is reflected in even more positive/less negative sentiment in female researchers‘ posts (H2). Using structural break analysis, the impact of the pandemic was found to be statistically significant for positive sentiments. A differential effect by gender was observed descriptively, but did not reach statistical significance. The results suggest a positivity bias in scholarly communication on Twitter/X, with only changes in positive sentiments as an indicator of researchers‘ emotional well-being. Gender differences were found for general sentiment magnitude, but not in the effect of the pandemic. Exploratory analysis of cognitive well-being revealed relationships and accomplishment as the predominant PERMA + 4 dimensions in researchers‘ posts. We discuss promising expansions of our approach and highlight practical implications for policymakers.

Keywords: Social media sentiment; Academic social networks; Unobtrusive assessment; Computational psychology; Psychology of science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-025-00902-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jhappi:v:26:y:2025:i:6:d:10.1007_s10902-025-00902-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10902-025-00902-7

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave

More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().