South Africa, Aug. 11 -- Dr Kurt Marais, a lecturer in the Department of Logistics at Stellenbosch University (SU) - who recently earned his doctorate in operations research from SU - examined how the sentiment of emotional content spreads through social media and explored ways to measure its impact on users' mental health, focusing specifically on depression.

Marais analysed posts from a depression-focused subreddit (an online discussion group or forum on Reddit where users post and comment on a specific topic) to identify common words, phrases, and patterns.

The lingo

He developed a depression-specific sentiment lexicon (a structured list of words used to measure depressive emotional tone in text) that can accurately detect language ...