Canadian Psychology/Psychologie

canadienne
Using Geolocated Social Media for Ecological Momentary
Assessments of Emotion: Innovative Opportunities in
Psychology Science and Practice
Krystelle Shaughnessy, Rebeca Reyes, Ketan Shankardass, Martin Sykora, Rob Feick, Haydn
Lawrence, and Colin Robertson
Online First Publication, June 26, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cap0000099

CITATION
Shaughnessy, K., Reyes, R., Shankardass, K., Sykora, M., Feick, R., Lawrence, H., & Robertson, C.
(2017, June 26). Using Geolocated Social Media for Ecological Momentary Assessments of
Emotion: Innovative Opportunities in Psychology Science and Practice. Canadian
Psychology/Psychologie canadienne. Advance online publication.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cap0000099
Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne © 2017 Canadian Psychological Association
2017, Vol. 1, No. 2, 000 0708-5591/17/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cap0000099

Using Geolocated Social Media for Ecological Momentary Assessments of

Emotion: Innovative Opportunities in Psychology Science and Practice

Krystelle Shaughnessy and Rebeca Reyes Ketan Shankardass

University of Ottawa Wilfrid Laurier University

Martin Sykora Rob Feick and Haydn Lawrence

Loughborough University University of Waterloo

Colin Robertson
Wilfrid Laurier University

Social media applications have become popular methods of online communication, interaction, and social
networking. Many people use social media websites and mobile applications, such as Twitter, to create
and post personal expressions in public online forums. This online content presents opportunities for
using social media as a data source with the potential to improve evaluation of theoretical models of
emotional and stressful experiences across various topics and subfields of psychology science and
practice. In this article, we discuss emerging information retrieval and analytic methods using social
media for ecological momentary assessments of emotion. We describe 2 specific methods we have
developed in the context of Twitter and their use in a broader study investigating relationships among
people’s emotional experiences, their expressions of experiences in social media, their daily geospatial
movements and locations, and their stress experiences. We conclude with a discussion of potential
applications and ethical considerations for these methods in professional psychology practice and
science.

Keywords: social media, ecological momentary assessments, sentiment analysis, stress surveillance,
Internet-based assessments

Recent advances in Internet and mobile technologies, computa-
tional methods, and natural language processing, along with thriv-
ing social media adoption, have created new opportunities for
evaluating people’s experiences across time and locations. In par-
ticular, new data sources and analytical methods for assessing
emotion expressions are emerging. These may provide innovative
alternatives to conventional approaches to evaluation and treat-
ment and help advance theoretical models in clinical, community,
Krystelle Shaughnessy and Rebeca Reyes, School of Psychology, Uni-
versity of Ottawa; Ketan Shankardass, Psychology Department, Wilfrid
Laurier University; Martin Sykora, Centre for Information Management,
Loughborough University; Rob Feick, School of Planning, University of
Waterloo; Haydn Lawrence, Department of Geography and Environmental
Management, University of Waterloo; Colin Robertson, Department of
Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University.
The methods described in this study were developed with funding from
a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership
Development Grant and Wilfrid Laurier University. The authors acknowl-
edge contributions to the larger project described herein from Thomas W.
Jackson and Becca Coates.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Krystelle
Shaughnessy, School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, 136 Jean
Jacques Lussier, Vanier Hall, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 6N5. E-mail:
kshaughn@uottawa.ca
and organisational psychology, specifically and psychology sci-
ence generally. Interdisciplinary research and development teams
that include social sciences, health sciences, and information sci-
ences are exploring ways to translate these opportunities into
practical solutions for practitioners.
The term social media refers to an evolving group of Internet-
based applications through which users create and exchange con-
tent (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). As noted in a recent review, this
type of content presents “exciting possibilities” for improving
mental health at the population, subpopulation, and individual
levels (Conway & O’Connor, 2016). Indeed, there is some evi-
dence that emotional expressions through social media—particu-
larly Twitter— can be predictive of health conditions such as heart
disease (Eichstaedt et al., 2015) and depressive disorders (De
Choudhury, Gamon, Counts, & Horvitz, 2013) and can accurately
differentiate people with varying psychological diagnoses
(Coppersmith, Dredze, & Harman, 2014; for a review, see
Conway & O’Connor, 2016). However, research using social
media as a data source for mental health is sparse, and meth-
odologies and theoretical frameworks for doing so are continu-
ing to evolve.
In this brief article, we describe two novel and flexible methods
for using social media for ecological momentary assessments of
emotion—that is, for ongoing evaluation of in-the-moment expe-
riences (Hofmann & Patel, 2015). Both methods capture emotional
experiences in near real-time and repetitively across a given time

1
2 SHAUGHNESSY ET AL.
frame. They also provide an automated means of linking these
emotional experiences to people’s actual context through the lo-
cation and timing of their social media activities. We describe an
ongoing research project in which we use these methods to build
a better understanding of the relationships between emotional
expressions and environmental and social contexts with respect to
chronic stress. These novel methods will also contribute to a
rapidly growing field of research that uses social media platforms
for recruitment and data collection (King, O’Rourke, & DeLongis,
2014). We conclude by presenting potential opportunities for using
these methods in professional psychology practice and science and
a brief discussion of key ethical considerations. In line with pro-
posed guidelines for the ethical use of mobile technology for
clinicians in Canada (Prentice & Dobson, 2014), we discuss clin-
ical applications that complement rather than replace traditional
face-to-face assessments and interventions.
Mobile Social Media–Driven Momentary
Ecological Assessment
A number of psychological scientists have developed methods
for using people’s personal smartphones to conduct ecological
momentary assessments of their thoughts, behaviours, emotions,
and other experiences (e.g., Conway & O’Connor, 2016). These
methods typically involve applications that people download to
their phones or text messaging invitations to complete a survey at
random (or fixed) intervals of time or space. In other research
areas, scientists have developed methods and “big data analytics”
to harness social media content as a dynamic data source to
investigate issues as diverse as urban inequality (Shelton, Poorthuis,
& Zook, 2015) and the geographic relationships between social and
physical networks (Stephens & Poorthuis, 2015). However, very
few of these methods combine the geolocation capacity of smart-
phones (i.e., collection of global positioning system [GPS] coor-
dinates) with social media to examine variables of direct interest to
practicing psychologists. With geolocation data, scientists and
practitioners can contextualise people’s social media feeds in the
actual environments in which they occur.
By simply skimming the public output on various social media
sites, it is evident that many people use their digital devices (e.g.,
smartphones, tablets, laptops) to post personal expressions and
content that are related to their real-time context or experience.
When this personal information is public, such as in the case of
public Twitter profiles, it and any coded information attached to it
(e.g., geocoded device location data) become widely accessible to
outside individuals. Individuals can also decide to make their
private social media content accessible to scientists or practitioners
if they adjust the appropriate permissions on their accounts. The
dynamic data on social media offer opportunities to recruit partic-
ipants and collect data for research studies. For example, it is
possible to use participants’ activity on their smartphones (includ-
ing posts on social media) to trigger study events or as data in and
of themselves. Clinicians and consultants could also use these
types of data to monitor (with or without collecting) their clients’
affective and cognitive states or social media interactions. Through
this largely unobtrusive approach, it is possible to identify complex
patterns in personal experiences for a time-limited assessment or
changes in patterns over time that may be predictive of the need for
an immediate intervention.
Although the possibilities for using social media content are
broad, psychology scientists and practitioners will likely use these
methods only if they are accessible and applicable to a range of
psychology-related questions, contexts, and purposes. We used
recent advances in sentiment analysis (i.e., automatic identification
of emotions, attitudes, their polarity and strength; Pang & Lee,
2008) to develop two ways of using people’s personal expressions
on social media content to assess their ongoing experiences of
emotion and stress in near real-time. We expect these methods to
not only have wide appeal for research and practice in the social
sciences and psychology but also to alleviate the need for psychol-
ogy scientists and practitioners to develop their own methods or to
find people to develop methods for them.
Stresscapes: Developing Social Media–Driven Methods
to Assess Emotion and Stress
To develop our methods, we focused on Twitter content. Twitter
is an online social media application through which people post
text and expressions— called “tweets”— of up to 140 characters
(along with pictures, hyperlinks, etc.) and read or consume others’
tweets. Tweet content therefore contains both personal expressions
and other nonpersonal content. Users can make their Twitter
account “public” (meaning that everyone can see their account and
content) or “protected” (meaning that only people they approve
can see their account and posts). Recent data suggest that only a
small minority (5% or less) of Twitter users opt for “protected”
accounts (Liu, Kliman-Silver, & Mislove, 2014). In Twitter, users’
tweets are tagged with metadata— descriptive information about
the tweet such as geolocation information or date and time posted.
Twitter has a publicly available application programming interface
(API) that allows researchers to monitor and collect tweets as well
as filter tweets by variables such as keywords, location, and so
forth. Although only a small proportion of tweets include geo-
graphic coordinates (estimated at approximately 3% in Morstatter,
Pfeffer, Liu, & Carley, 2013), the sheer volume of tweets provides
sufficient georeferenced data points to explore the geospatial con-
text of tweet content—that is, the user’s actual location when he or
she posted the tweet.
For our ongoing study, we are using Twitter to develop two
methods for data collection of emotions and stress experiences
over time and place. In the first method, we used a sentiment
analysis system designed specifically for the analysis of emotion in
short text—Extracting the Meaning of Terse Information in a
Geo-Visualisation of Emotion (EMOTIVE; Sykora, Jackson,
O’Brien, & Elayan, 2013)—to automatically evaluate the emo-
tional content of tweets and to extend this system to include stress
experiences. In the second method, we created an automated
procedure that uses Twitter activity to trigger a brief self-reported
questionnaire of emotion and stress that is sent directly to users via
text or e-mail messaging. In an ongoing study, we are also eval-
uating how well a new stress-related extension of the EMOTIVE
ontology can automatically estimate the presence and magnitude
of stressful experiences in people’s daily lives as they move about
their environments. We believe that these methods have wide-
ranging applications in psychology and in the social sciences more
broadly.
 GEOLOCATED SOCIAL MEDIA ASSESSMENT
EMOTIVE Ontology
The EMOTIVE ontology is essentially a map of words and
phrases that represent emotions and that can be applied to auto-
matically detect fine-grained emotions in sparse text such as
tweets. Sykora and colleagues (2013) describe the development
and validation of EMOTIVE in detail. In brief, using psycholog-
ical research, Sykora and colleagues developed EMOTIVE to
automatically detect eight categories of emotion: anger, disgust,
fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, confusion, and shame. The word
map representing these emotions was developed manually using
semantic and linguistic analysis. To analyse the emotional content
of Twitter data, each tweet is fed into a custom natural language
processing pipeline that automatically detects expressions of the
eight emotions and employs semantic contexts from within the
ontology as well as parts of speech (e.g., verb, adjective, intensi-
fier) to disambiguate and differentiate the emotional strength of the
text (also known as the activation level; e.g., fear—uneasy, fearful,
petrified). An evaluation of the system against other benchmarks
commonly used to evaluate these types of systems (including
comparison against a data set coded by expert annotators) showed
excellent results (see Sykora et al., 2013). Although EMOTIVE is
focused on emotional expressions, the basic approach to its con-
struction using linguistics and discourse analysis can be used to
develop other ontological topics.
The following steps illustrate how psychological scientists and
practitioners could use EMOTIVE and similar advanced sentiment
analysis approaches. First, a data file must be assembled that
includes the text that will be analysed for emotional content. This
data file could be a spreadsheet or a comma-separated values
(CSV) file. The file would contain an ID field that distinguishes
unique participants or people and a separate field that contains
their text phrases or statements. Second, the data must be sent
through the EMOTIVE system to process the data file using the
natural language processing algorithms. Eight new fields that
correspond to the eight aforementioned emotions are added to the
original data file and used to record numeric scores that represent
the degree to which each emotion is found in the text. Thus, a text
phrase with low or no emotional content (e.g., I walked to the bus
stop) would result in low valence data across all eight emotions,
whereas other statements with higher levels of emotional content
(e.g., I missed my bus and now I am going to be late to the meeting,
sucks . . . grrr) would have higher scores in the respective emotion
fields. Third and finally, the scientist or practitioner could use the
output of the EMOTIVE classification in his or her own analyses
or in conjunction with any additional data such as demographic
variables or geographic context that were obtained as metadata
during the Twitter data collection.
In our current research, we are using the Twitter API to collect
publicly available, personal tweets from users in urban centres in
Canada. As tweets are posted, they are automatically sent as input
data into EMOTIVE, scanned for emotion, and added to a master
database. Each record in the output database includes pertinent
metadata collected by Twitter (e.g., Twitter username, timestamp,
geolocation [if available], the message text), and the eight emo-
tional strengths are detected. We can then link these emotional
scores to their geographic context, time of day, and the activity the
user was engaged in at the time. We are also extending the existing
EMOTIVE ontology beyond the eight emotions listed previously
3
to detect expressions of stress. The stress ontology was developed
using the same multistep procedure as the original EMOTIVE
ontology. A validation study is under way to test how accurately
the new stress ontology identifies and classifies text expressions of
stress in tweets as people move about their environment. Due to
current prefiltering limits in the Twitter API, we have taken
additional steps to remove professional or corporate tweets (e.g.,
City of Toronto, CTV News) and retweets (i.e., tweets of reposted
content generated by a different user) to ensure that our final
database contains only novel and personal content. Next, to vali-
date the new stress ontology, we will compute correlation statistics
between the self-reported stress measure (collected by using Twit-
ter to trigger ecological momentary assessments, as described in
the next section) and the ontology-derived stress magnitude as well
as compare the ontology-derived stress expressions to expert in-
terpretations of the tweeted stress content through measures of
precision and recall. This type of analysis can provide insight into
how well the algorithm is classifying stress and identify systematic
biases or problems (e.g., sarcasm, slang not handled by the ontol-
ogy), which can then be used to fine-tune the ontology definition.
Finally, we will also verify that the metadata are being collected as
expected and that the geolocation information demonstrates move-
ment between multiple locations. To date, we have collected over
2.5 million geocoded tweets from the API and have recruited over
100 participants to validate the new methods (see the following
section). Ultimately, at the end of data collection and analysis, we
are interested in investigating how emotionally classified content
from both the EMOTIVE and the stress ontology sentiment anal-
yses systems relate to features of the natural (e.g., green space) and
physical (e.g., walkability) environment.
Social Media–Triggered Self-Report Surveys
We are also using people’s Twitter activity to trigger ecological
momentary assessments of self-reported emotion and stress expe-
riences as close in time and location to the moment of the expe-
rience as possible. Recent research has demonstrated the value of
using mobile methodologies to directly engage people when and
where they are in order to develop more effective assessments of
their experience and environmental context (Büscher & Urry,
2009; Mascheroni, 2007; Sheller & Urry, 2006). Research suggests
that many people engage in microblogging (such as Twitter)
because they want to connect with others (Chen, 2011). Thus,
expressions of emotion in social media are likely motivated by
people’s desire to be connected with others generally and with
their community specifically. The social connection needs driving
Twitter activity make the moment that a person posts new, per-
sonal content an ideal time to capture his or her self-reported
experience. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are
currently no methods to use social media activity as a trigger for
brief self-report surveys.
To explore the potential of using social media to trigger
ecological momentary assessments, we developed a system that
sends research study participants a self-report survey immedi-
ately following their activity on Twitter. We are using this
system in a study of adults recruited from urban centres in
Canada. Participants must complete an eligibility survey and
background questionnaire prior to entering the study. Eligible
participants must post public tweets, provide their Twitter user-
4 SHAUGHNESSY ET AL.

name and cell phone number to the research team, and agree to Applications for Professional Psychologists
be contacted via short message system (SMS or test message)
and/or e-mail. Once a participant is entered into the study, we These new and emerging methods present opportunities for
psychology scientists and practitioners. In general, the social
follow his or her Twitter account and send a maximum of three
media– driven methods presented in this article contain the benefits
self-report questionnaires per day in response to Twitter activity
that accompany ecological momentary assessment, including lim-
(i.e., posting personal content). After 14 observations are re-
iting recall bias, facilitating longitudinal data collection, enhancing
corded, participants are prompted to terminate their participa-
ecological validity, and possibly elucidating new patterns of ex-
tion in the study; however, they can request to leave at any time.
perience (Hofmann & Patel, 2015; Shiffman, Stone, & Hufford,
Each time one of the study participants posts novel, personal
2008; Trull & Ebner-Priemer, 2009). For scientists, the opportu-
content to Twitter, an e-mail and/or SMS message may be
nities these benefits provide may be obvious. However, these may
triggered (with options for the maximum number of surveys per
be less obvious for psychology practitioners such as clinicians and
day or time interval) to send the participant a link to a short
consultants who function in applied settings. The following list
survey. We use the metadata encoded in the tweet itself, which
enumerates some of the ways that we believe psychologists could
we access through Twitter’s API, to contextualise the location
apply these methods to improve their work. This list is by no
and time of the social media activity that triggered the self-
means exhaustive; it represents but a few opportunities that we
report survey. Using geographic information systems (GIS),
foresee.
this information can then be linked to other variables assessing
the context of the tweet, such as proximity to green space, 1. Social, personality, developmental, and clinical psychol-
traffic conditions, pollution levels, weather, or other potential ogists could use these methods to improve research on
environmental stressors. We also use these metadata to link the emotional experiences, expression of emotions, and the
survey responses from the triggered web-based survey to the function of social media in young people’s emotional
actual content of the tweet. Currently, we are using a web development. The data collected using EMOTIVE and
interface and links to web-based surveys; in the future, we may other sentiment analysis procedures or by triggering brief
use a stand-alone app that automatically sends notifications and mood ratings linked to social media activity would pro-
survey items directly to the participant’s device. To date (Sep- vide information about changes in emotional states over
tember 1, 2016), we have recruited 110 participants to the time and across different contexts. These data could be
study, 29 of whom have provided at least 14 data points. used to enhance theoretical models on the function of
emotions, emotional expression, and emotional develop-
ment.
Combining Sentiment Analyses and Social Media
Triggering: Validating Emotional Twitter Content 2. Community psychologists could improve population as-
sessment across a broad range of topics using the de-
The methods described herein can be used on their own or in
scribed methods (or similar methods). For example, at the
conjunction with each other. In our ongoing project (see also
city level, psychologists could monitor changes in emo-
Sykora et al., 2015), we are using participants’ Twitter activity
tional and stressful expressions in social media over time
to trigger a brief self-report survey about their current emo-
to identify where communities are experiencing tempo-
tional state, level of distress, and environmental context. We are
rary, recurrent, or ongoing collective stress (i.e., higher
also asking participants about their perception of the extent that
than average emotional stress among residents). This
their tweet content was related to their social– environmental con-
information could provide an initial step toward increas-
text at the time of the tweet. We then collate these data to the actual
ing community-based efforts to understand the nature of
tweet that triggered the survey and the emotion and stress infor-
the changes (e.g., What are the stressors commonly af-
mation tagged by EMOTIVE (extended with the new stress ontol-
fecting local residents?) and identify desirable solutions
ogy). With this information, we will evaluate the extent to which to mitigate the impact of stressors.
content coded as emotional and stressful by the automated ontol-
ogy coincides with people’s reported emotion and stress as close in 3. Clinical psychologists could employ these new methods
time to the moment of posting the tweet as possible (using corre- in their clinical practice, with informed consent, to im-
lational and regression-based analyses). Thus, we will evaluate the prove assessment or treatment. For example, instead of
validity of the extended EMOTIVE ontology specifically as well relying on clients’ recall of recent events and experiences
as the validity of using social media to assess emotional and between sessions, clinicians could use a system like
stressful experiences generally. In addition, we will examine rela- EMOTIVE to monitor clients’ social media content for
tionships between the geospatial information captured by geolo- emotions, thoughts, and behaviours as they occur be-
cation data attached to the tweets, with participants’ self-reported tween session dates. Within this approach, a clinician
context at the time of the tweet. We expect these results to inform could supplement a client’s description of his or her
the validity of using social media content as an indicator of how experiences between two sessions with a data file that
people experience their environmental and social contexts could be used to quickly detect key emotional events that
throughout their daily lives. Finally, we will explore the predictive were expressed in the client’s social media content. Cli-
validity of the self-reporting and extended EMOTIVE ontology nicians could use this information therapeutically in ses-
data on acute and chronic stress. sion (e.g., to develop emotional awareness or insight into
 GEOLOCATED SOCIAL MEDIA ASSESSMENT
patterns of emotional experiences and their outcomes
across time and locations) or as information integrated
into an assessment report or case conceptualisation (e.g.,
to connect with others or cope with strong emotional
states). Clinicians could also collaboratively identify so-
cial media activity that seems particularly helpful or
unhelpful to a client (e.g., tweeting late at night) and then
use that activity to trigger delivery of a reminder text or
e-mail to encourage the client to engage in an alternative
therapeutic activity (e.g., shut off blue screens, practice
deep breathing) or complete a mood or activity record.
As such, the social media content becomes additional
data for clinicians to better evaluate and understand their
clients’ experiences as well as a situation or context for
therapeutic activities and engagement.
4. With employees’ consent, organisational psychologists
could use these new methods to improve research and
assessments related to employee productivity or satisfac-
tion. For example, employees’ social media feeds may
elucidate information related to working conditions, the
emotional context of work, work–life balance, and diffi-
cult experiences that employees may not readily reveal
on self-report measures or in the workplace. Self-report
measures triggered by social media activity during work-
ing hours could identify variables related to lost produc-
tivity or, in contrast, practices that are efficient and result
in spare time during the workday.
Ethical Considerations
Although the benefits of using social media for ecological
momentary assessment provide new opportunities for researchers
and practitioners, there are a number of important ethical consid-
erations for using social media to advance psychology science and
practice. The framing of ethical practices for research using data
from social media communities is an ongoing challenge and a
contentious topic among the scientific community (McKee, 2013;
Shilton & Sayles, 2016). The lack of consensus on ethical practices
may stem from the absence of clear guidelines in the governing
policies to address key issues such as privacy, informed consent,
and confidentiality that are adapted to the online research context
(Warrell & Jacobsen, 2014). Several authors have proposed best
practices to assist researchers in navigating the landscape of ethics
in online research (e.g., Hutton & Henderson, 2013, 2015;
Markham & Buchanan, 2012; Neuhaus & Webmoor, 2012; Rivers
& Lewis, 2014). In the clinical context, the Canadian Psycholog-
ical Association (CPA) has recognised the evolving and increasing
use of electronic media in practice. Consequently, it issued guide-
lines addressing key ethical considerations applicable to the pro-
vision of psychological e-services (CPA, 2006). However, these
guidelines provide little information specific to social media use.
Recently, the Canadian Medical Association (2012) published
guidelines about the use of social media in a clinical setting. A
thorough review of the ethical debate is beyond the scope of this
article. However, we wish to highlight general ethical consider-
ations for social media use in practice and research and for Twitter
specifically.
5
First, the line between private and public content is complex.
The user’s expectation of privacy is dynamic and highly influ-
enced by context (Conway & O’Connor, 2016; Eysenbach & Till,
2001; Lunnay, Borlagdan, McNaughton, & Ward, 2015; McKee,
2013). Protecting privacy online therefore involves multiple com-
ponents such as protecting identifiable information and the need to
understand users’ expectations of privacy even when the informa-
tion is public (Conway & O’Connor, 2016; Lunnay et al., 2015).
As a case in point, consider the dissemination of materials in a way
that was originally unintended by the users or in a way that the
users disagree with. Both of these situations embody a violation of
privacy and pose an ethical concern. In the context of our ongoing
project, participants are informed at the outset about the intended
use and dissemination of the data as an integral part of the
informed consent form. In addition, we include a description of
steps that will be taken to protect personal information that is
collected during the study. Other researchers and practitioners
would need to include similar information in obtaining informed
consent prior to accessing identifiable social media content for
research or practice.
There are also specific ethical precautions for using Twitter
data. The APIs that enable real-time access to vast amounts of
information about Twitter users can also enable access to other
sources of information (i.e., other social media platforms such as
Facebook). This prospect carries with it a privacy pitfall. To
address this problem, Rivers and Lewis (2014) recommend a
focused collection approach to preserve anonymity. A focused
collection approach requires researchers to seek prior ethics ap-
proval for methods that involve the collection of information from
secondary sources that can be linked to Twitter usernames or
geolocations (for a complete discussion, see Rivers & Lewis,
2014).
Protecting privacy could also be particularly challenging for
practitioners seeking to use social media in their practices. Con-
sider the application we proposed for organisational psychologists.
In this particular context, the consideration of employees’ expec-
tations of privacy and anonymity (especially with the expression of
comments about their workplace) is paramount. It is reasonable to
believe that employees will have reservations about how their
tweets might be used by the employer. Even though the informa-
tion is publicly available, it does not imply the ethical use of this
information by the organisation without informed consent. It is
imperative that practitioners consider the risks and benefits for all
stakeholders prior to deciding to use social media content as part
of an evaluation project. Additionally, there are ways in which
practitioners can ensure the anonymity of participants—for exam-
ple, by removing handles (i.e., usernames) connected with content
from tweets or by only reporting aggregated content that is not
directly quoted. Social media content can be handled in similar
ethical ways as qualitative data gathered from interviews or focus
groups.
Our suggested application for community psychologists pro-
vides another concrete example of the need for researchers and
practitioners to consider the risks and benefits of using social
media content from multiple stakeholders. For instance, the dis-
semination of population-based information may also increase the
risk that specific geographic communities are stigmatised or inap-
propriately classified. For example, a community labelled as
stressful may experience cascading negative psychosocial and
6 SHAUGHNESSY ET AL.
economic impacts as it becomes less appealing to actual and
prospective members. In light of these increased risks, the report-
ing of population-based information should be done judiciously
and in a purposeful manner. Ethical decisions in this matter should
be guided by the principle of responsible caring and with the
protection of vulnerable populations in mind. As stipulated in the
Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists (CPA, 2000), respon-
sible caring implies the thorough consideration of risks and ben-
efits to the targeted population before the dissemination of poten-
tial harmful information (II. 13–17). In addition, particular care
should be exercised when reporting information regarding vulner-
able groups (IV. 26).
Conclusion
The evolution of Internet-based technologies has led not only to
changes in how and where people use technology but also to new
methods that use these technologies to better understand people’s
lived experiences. Emerging methods in social media– driven as-
sessments present opportunities for psychologists to embrace tech-
nology to improve their science and practice, particularly by im-
proving their access to ecological momentary assessments of
experience. We have briefly described two ways in which personal
social media content can be evaluated for emotion and, as an
extension, stress, experiences, and expressions. We believe that
these and similar methods have wide-ranging appeal, not only for
psychologists but also for social and health sciences more broadly.
A key factor in the potential success of social media– driven
methods in psychology is the willingness for psychologists to
engage in interdisciplinary collaborations rather than limit them-
selves to the technologies and data sets with which they are most
comfortable and in which they have already been trained. Cer-
tainly, creating an ontology, creating a natural language processing
pipeline, and working with APIs are daunting ideas for many, if
not most, psychology scientists and practitioners. Additionally, to
exploit these and other novel data acquisition methods, interdisci-
plinary teams are needed to develop and apply appropriate statis-
tical methods. This limit will remain until new statistical methods
for analysing the resulting data become available and accessible in
software packages. Thus, there exists an additional opportunity for
quantitative psychology scientists to build and make general data
analytic tools available to the broader psychology community.
Ethical guidelines and standards for researchers’ and practitioners’
use of people’s social media content are sparse. Psychologists have
the opportunity and responsibility to contribute to and influence
the development of new ethical guidelines concerning the appro-
priate use of social media content.
Regardless of these limits, the digital and physical worlds are
becoming increasingly intertwined and permeated by data. It is
imperative that psychologists engage in and use new media, in-
formation sources, and evaluation methods to improve their
knowledge and treatment of people at the individual, group, com-
munity, and population levels.
Résumé
Les applications des médias sociaux sont devenues de populaires
moyens de communication, d’interaction et de réseautage social en
ligne. Un grand nombre d’utilisateurs des sites Web et des appli-
cations mobiles des médias sociaux, tel Twitter, créent des conte-
nus d’expression personnelle qu’ils affichent ensuite sur des fo-
rums publics. Ces contenus électroniques donnent la possibilité
d’utiliser les médias sociaux comme une source de données ser-
vant éventuellement à améliorer l’évaluation des modèles
théoriques d’expériences affectives et stressantes dans divers do-
maines et sous-domaines de la science et de la pratique de la
psychologie. Dans le présent article, nous examinons de nouvelles
méthodes de récupération et d’analyse de l’information, basées sur
l’utilisation des médias sociaux, pour effectuer des évaluations
écologiques momentanées des émotions. Nous décrivons deux
méthodes particulières, que nous avons élaborées dans le contexte
de Twitter, et leur utilisation dans une étude plus générale sur les
liens existant entre les expériences affectives des personnes, le
récit de leurs expériences dans les médias sociaux, leurs déplace-
ments et emplacements géographiques quotidiens et leurs expéri-
ences en matière de stress. Nous terminons par une discussion sur
les éventuelles applications de ces méthodes dans la science et la
pratique de la psychologie et les considérations éthiques inhérentes
à ces applications.
Mots-clés : médias sociaux, évaluations écologiques momen-
tanées, analyse des sentiments, surveillance du stress, évaluations
sur Internet.
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Received February 16, 2016
Revision received November 21, 2016
Accepted November 22, 2016 䡲