‘Depression Has an Impact on Social and Educational Achievement’

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

At the regular seminar of the HSE Institute of Education, Ivan Smirnov, Head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Sciences, presented his ongoing research project that examines the psychological well-being of students using their digital footprints.

‘Most research in the field of education focuses on students’ academic performance, while the topic of psychological health is often of lesser interest. Moreover, it is proved that a low level of psychological well-being reduces human productivity. 50% of the working days that people miss for health reasons are caused in one way or another by stress and depression. But people don’t speak openly about this—usually we say we have a headache or abdominal pain, so the problem of depression remains invisible,’ says Ivan Smirnov, Head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Sciences

Psychological well-being is not well understood, not only because it does not receive enough attention from researchers, but also because it is difficult to study, especially when using traditional methods.

Digital footprints and new methods of machine learning make it possible to partially overcome the challenges that researching well-being presents. New data sources are appearing so complex patterns can be analyzed using big data, while modeling allows researchers to predict the behavior of complex systems and identify patterns.

Well-being vs. Depression

There are many different definitions of psychological well-being. In order to avoid having to choose the one best definition and work with it, this study focuses on depression. The topic of depression has been studied quite well and its effect on important life outcomes has been proven. In addition, depression is associated with social context.

Research Results

An analysis of the relationship between the severity of students’ symptoms of depression according to PHQ-9 questionnaires they completed and their academic performance on PISA and the Unified State Examination showed that there is no correlation between the two for women. However, there is a statistically significant correlation for men. For example, the level of depression in women remains approximately the same, regardless of the results of PISA literacy, while in men the PHQ-9 increases.

Predictions Based on VK Posts

An analysis of more than 3,000 student posts on Russia’s largest social media website, VK, revealed predictor words for high and low academic performance. Semantically related words were grouped side by side in a model based on a vector representation of words.

Tone and Timing of Posts

Posts uploaded by students in St. Petersburg were analyzed in terms of their tone as an indicator of depression. The correlation was 0.7 depending on the number of posts and the time they were written. After 12 AM, the number of negative posts sharply increases, which is confirmed by other studies. The relationship between the time of a student’s last post and their academic performance was also established—more successful students write their posts later. The analysis showed that the higher the student’s performance is, the more positive their posts are on social media. This dependence is more pronounced among girls.

Sentiment analysis and other classifications of emotional language, as linguists and dictionaries understand it, do not strongly correspond to psychological models of the emotional state. If a person writes a post that is negative in tone, it is not necessarily an indication of their general psychological state.

Olga Bogolyubova
PhD in Psychology, Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of Malta

Another conclusion from the study is that a person with a small network of friends who are not strongly connected to each other is 4 times more likely to experience depression than a person with a large number of friends with high levels of clusterization.

People with signs of depression are more likely to use first-person pronouns, singular words and the past tense.

Natalya Kiselnikova
PhD in Psychology, Deputy Director for Scientific and Organizational Development, Head of the Laboratory of Advisory Psychology and Psychotherapy of the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education