Utilizing Social Media Data for Psychoanalysis to Study Human Personality

Frank Emmert-Streib; Olli Yli-Harja; Matthias Dehmer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02596

Utilizing Social Media Data for Psychoanalysis to Study Human Personality

Front Psychol. 2019 Nov 15:10:2596. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02596. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Frank Emmert-Streib^{1

2}, Olli Yli-Harja², Matthias Dehmer^{3

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Predictive Society and Data Analytics Lab, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland.
² Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Institute of Biosciences and Medical Technology, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland.
³ Faculty for Management, Institute for Intelligent Production, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Steyr, Austria.
⁴ Department of Mechatronics and Biomedical Computer Science, University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology (UMIT), Hall in Tirol, Austria.
⁵ College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Nankai, China.

Abstract

Social media data, for instance from Twitter or Facebook, provide a new type of data that consist of a mixture of text, image and video information. From a scientific point of view, the capabilities of this type of data from such microblogs are not well explored and to date it is largely unknown what principal knowledge can be extracted thereof. In this paper, we present a discussion of the capabilities of data from microblogs for performing a psychoanalysis. This could allow an analysis of the human personality of individual users. Such prospects raises serious concerns regarding the privacy of users of social media platforms.

Keywords: computational social science; data science; privacy; psychoanalysis; psychology.