Anxiety Detection in Reddit Posts Through Emotion Dynamics Analysis

Ashala Senanayake, Zilu Liang

2025

Abstract

Anxiety disorders have become a significant subset of mental health challenges in the context of complex modern social life. The widespread integration of social media into daily life has created platforms for individuals to share their updates, offering a rich resource for linguistic and behavioural analysis outside traditional clinical settings. Among these platforms, Reddit stands out as a valuable tool for researchers due to its rich and diverse textual data. This paper leverages five commonly used machine learning models: decision tree, random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbours, linear regression, and naive Bayes to explore the emotional dynamics present in Reddit posts for detecting anxiety. Reddit posts from 1,800 users, categorized as either anxiety or non-anxiety, were used for model training, validation, and testing, with data split into 70%, 15%, and 15%, respectively. The decision-making process of the best-performing model was evaluated by incorporating feature importance. RF achieved the best performance among all models, with an accuracy of 89%. Its interpretation revealed that average emotion scores and normalized emotion gaps were key factors, highlighting the significance of emotional intensity and variability over time. Furthermore, the results indicate that emotions such as sadness and joy play a particularly significant role in detecting anxiety.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Senanayake A. and Liang Z. (2025). Anxiety Detection in Reddit Posts Through Emotion Dynamics Analysis. In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-731-3, SciTePress, pages 920-927. DOI: 10.5220/0013375900003911

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf25,
author={Ashala Senanayake and Zilu Liang},
title={Anxiety Detection in Reddit Posts Through Emotion Dynamics Analysis},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF},
year={2025},
pages={920-927},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013375900003911},
isbn={978-989-758-731-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF
TI - Anxiety Detection in Reddit Posts Through Emotion Dynamics Analysis
SN - 978-989-758-731-3
AU - Senanayake A.
AU - Liang Z.
PY - 2025
SP - 920
EP - 927
DO - 10.5220/0013375900003911
PB - SciTePress