Web-scraping the Expression of Loneliness during COVID-19

This paper is my first first-author publication. As I started my Master’s during COVID-19, when social contacts were limited, I realized the importance of investigating loneliness. In this paper, we investigated loneliness in the COVID-19 era through text analyses on social media posts, as social media posts vividly capture naturalistic thoughts and emotional expressions. We collected texts from loneliness-related subcommunities of Reddit that are written after the outbreak of COVID-19 through web scraping, and used N-gram frequency analysis and correlated topic models to analyze the data. Results revealed that lonely individuals showed more internal focus of attention and linguistic markers related to depression, anxiety, and helplessness.