Researchers tout that expressions of negative emotions on Twitter have been associated with a higher risk of heart disease, despite many of us thinking that doing so would feel therapeutic. The researchers hail from the University of Pennsylvania, which does point to a rather strong correlation between a community’s use of negative emotional language on Twitter alongside heart disease mortality.
Other studies in the past point to factors that are associated with the risk of heart disease include low income, smoking and stress, but it sees that Twitter could very well capture additional information concerning heart disease risk as opposed to the combination of other traditional factors. It seems that a set of public tweets made between 2009 and 2010 which carried expletives and words such as ‘hate’ saw higher rates of heart disease mortality in the users. Food for thought, right?