Investigation of college students’ mental health status via semantic analysis of Sina microblog

Abstract

The objective of this study is to understand the current mental status of college students in mainland China. In this study, 60 thousand college students’ microblog content from January 2014 to June 2014 was collected. An emotional energy level, which was developed by a psychologist David R Hawkins, was taken as a basis for ontology database to divide the student’s emotion into three parts-positive, negative and neutral status. An ontology-based semantic analysis method was used to analyze the microblog data. The result shows that 46.38% of Sina microblog data reflects positive psychological status, and the ratios of neutral and negative psychological status are 19.77% and 33.85%, respectively. It means that almost one third microblog reflects some negative mentality. The semantic analysis of the big data suggests that most students have healthy mental status, and the negative status of the students should not be ignored.