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Breakups are a fundamental part of the human experience, but grief is never a routine. The final chapter of a romantic relationship is often plagued by questions – What changed? Who has changed? – and serious introspection and rumination. Breakups turn a person’s world up so much, new research shows you might be ending things without even realizing it.
In a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers show how impending ruptures can be identified up to three months before they actually happen. The team discovered this change by taking a close look at Redditors’ posts on Reddit’s r / BreakUps – an anonymous discussion board for failed relationships – before and after sharing their story. own story at the forum.
The results suggest that people are affected by a future breakup even before they realize a breakup is in the cards. The language markers used to detect impending ruptures, in turn, lasted up to six months after the event.
Two common changes observed in the language of messages were:
- The language has become more staff, with the increased use of “I” and “we”.
- The tongue showed signs of cognitive processing.
Sarah Seraj is a research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study. She says Reverse the effect of a break goes well beyond the romantic realm.
“These changes were detectable even when people weren’t directly talking about their relationship, showing the impact of the breakups on all aspects of their lives,” Seraj says.
“The changes in people’s language even before the actual breakup meant that while they didn’t necessarily know the end of the relationship was coming, it was already affecting their lives,” she says.
“The cracks in the relationship can appear sometime before the actual end of the relationship, which can arise when people tell others about it.”
How are the breaks – Ruptures, Seraj explains, are difficult to study in a natural setting. Researchers typically use retrospective self-reports to determine what happened – and if you’ve ever listened to a friend tell their own breakup story, you’ll know those accounts may not be as reliable or objective as science l ‘required.
“We can follow people over time and ask them to fill out surveys, but we can’t exactly follow them in their personal lives and record conversations with their friends and family about their breakup,” Seraj says.
Instead, Seraj and his team turned to as objective a measure as possible: natural language data. At first glance, this data looks like a social media post or text chat with friends. Through the eyes of a scientist, they offer a recording of subtle changes in psychological states. Computational analysis of natural language, Seraj explains, is a fairly new – but critical – tool. Computers can detect small changes that a person can’t – like the way pronouns and prepositions play out in psychology.
Call on Redditors – To collect data in natural language, the team turned to Reddit. In the end, they analyzed over 1 million posts from 6,800 Reddit users gathered a year before and a year after sharing news of their breakups on the r / BreakUps subreddit.
What makes Reddit useful for this type of study, Seraj explains, is that you can follow a person’s conversations in different areas of their life based on the subtitles they engage with. Once a user was identified as going through a breakup – due to their posting on r / BreakUps – the team could track how they were discussing other topics before and after the event, and observe whether changes in language use spill over into those other conversations. To be included in the dataset, users had to have at least five posts on Reddit, at least one post on a subdirectory other than r / BreakUps, and have posted at least one month before and after their own breakup.
“One of the other cool things about Reddit is that people post about their lives using anonymous user credentials,” Seraj says.
“It not only allows them to talk about deeply personal matters without fear of it coming back to their personal lives, but it also protects their identity.”
What was discovered – Linguistic markers of impending rifts were evident up to three months before the event, peaked the week of the rift, and initially returned about six months later, according to the study.
Language markers include increased use of the words “I” and “we” and what researchers call “cognitive processing” words.
Cognitive processing refers to how a person makes sense or reacts to an event. In the context of this study, an example would be when people are trying to understand why their relationship ended and to understand their role.
In this example from the study, the words in bold are signs of cognitive processing:
“I follow undecided whether or not to share my story. I need some Help me because I feel lost But my story is long and I do not know if it’s worth sharing. “
The language changes observed in the pre-disruption phase suggest that disruptions in typical thought patterns occur before the disruptions themselves occur.
“The reason cognitive processing of words was high even before the breakup is because relationships rarely go south overnight,” Seraj says.
“The cracks in the relationship can appear sometime before the actual end of the relationship, which can arise when people tell others about it.”
The big takeaway – This study is the first to track the length of time breakups affect emotional states by analyzing linguistic data. On average, it took users about nine months to return to their base.
In the end, people who posted about their breakup for long periods of time had the hardest time recovering and took the longest time to move on.
It makes sense in some ways, but not in others. Studies suggest that “expressive writing” can modestly improve mental health in times of misfortune. But rumination can harm the psyche. By repeatedly writing about the same events, the study team theorizes, can cause individuals to constantly relive distressing events, ultimately delaying their recovery.
“People who talked about their break-ups for long periods of time were less suited than people who initially looked for support but then moved on,” Seraj says.
“Maybe it’s because they had a worse breakup at first, but maybe it’s also because they were brooding about their breakup.”
During the study, Seraj and his colleagues “read so many heartbreaking stories about breakups.”
There is a ray of hope for the suddenly single, however: Those facing a loss of love aren’t really alone, Seraj says.
“It will be a struggle at first, but things will get better,” she said. “For most of the participants in our study, it took about six months for things to get back to normal. It’s longer than you think!
Abstract: By analyzing the language on the social media platform Reddit, we followed the social, cognitive and emotional lives of people as they dealt with the breakdown of a close intimate relationship. Language markers can detect impending relationship breaks up to 3 months before they occur, with psychological sequelae continuing for 6 months after the breakup. Because language changes are also apparent in unrelated subreddits (forums), research highlights the pervasive impact of personal upheaval on people’s social worlds. Comparable cognitive and social effects are apparent in people going through divorce or facing major life secrets. Analysis of subtle changes in pronouns, articles and other almost invisible words can reveal the psychological effects of life experiences.
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