The University of Pennsylvania is using a $668,114 federal grant in a follow-up study to determine if there is any link between a person's Twitter posts and heart health.
The three-year grant from the
National Institutes of Health is paying for researchers to gather data about heart problems by evaluating tweets, and to use Twitter to deliver "high impact" heart disease information to "improve patient activation and disease management," reports
The Weekly Standard.
The grant was awarded after the university published the results of its earlier study, "Psychological Language on Twitter Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality," in the journal Psychological Science.
The current, federally funded study seeks to use Twitter to help improve health, while the previous study focused more on the relationship between heart health and emotional language used in tweets.
In the first study, done on tweets posted in 2009 and 2010, researchers found that people who tweeted words like "hate" or statements using expletives were more likely to have heart disease mortality.
But tweets using positive language were found to protect against heart disease, the first study showed.
However, after the results of the first study were published in The Telegraph — under the headline "Angry tweeting 'could increase your risk of heart disease'" — the NIH took offense, reports The Weekly Standard.
It then published its own explanation of the study, saying a more accurate headline would have been "Stress and other negative psychological emotions increase risk of heart disease, and these people are more likely to send angry tweets."
Raina Merchant, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the university, "runs a Twitter lab which analyzes tweets related to resuscitation, critical care, and public health/policy," a description on the
school's website says.
Further, it says she "conducted several projects evaluating health communication on social/mobile media sites like Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Gigwalk, and others."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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