How Do You Thrive: Exploring Expressions of Positive Psychological Concepts and Post-Traumatic Growth on Reddit via Text Mining

Psychological trauma can lead to debilitating health outcomes but can also facilitate personal growth. Researchers usually study post-traumatic growth (PTG) with small samples in real-life settings, showing consistent correlations with positive psychological concepts (PPCs). Despite the widespread use of social media for social support, there is a lack of research on textual markers connecting PPCs and PTG in online forums, calling for a closer investigation. A total of 1,000 threads and 4,519 comments were scraped from a popular traumarelated subreddit posted over a one-year period. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and text mining procedures were used to determine the frequency of preselected PPCs and emerging related terms. Sentiment and emotional tone were estimated via lexicon-based sentiment analyses and LIWC, adjacent to cognition, affect, sociality and health categories. Differences between posts with PPCs and posts without were tested using chi-square and t-tests. The study identified 194 terms related to the 57 preselected PPCs in nearly 60% of all investigated posts. From all PPCs, the tokens thank, love, and friends were most frequently observed. Overall, social PPCs like positive relationships were represented the most. Chi-square and t-tests showed that PPC posts conveyed more positive sentiment and tone than those without.