Lyle Ungar

Biographic Data

ID839727
NAMELyle Ungar
GIVEN NAMESLyle
FAMILY NAMEUngar
SIGNATUREUNGAR L
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Pennsylvania
ORCID0000-0003-2047-1443
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS34
TOTAL CITATIONS41
AUTHOR COUNT34
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2013
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX4

  • Is a random human peer better than a highly supportive chatbot in reducing loneliness over time

    Open AccessR Li, Ruo-Ning Li et al.ARTICLEJournal of Experimental Social…2026References: 29

    AI chatbots are increasingly embedded in social life, offering accessible companionship. While brief interactions have been shown to provide immediate benefits, it is unclear whether repeated, daily engagement with chatbots reduces loneliness. In this pre-registered study, we tested the effectiveness of a chatbot versus a human peer in reducing loneliness among 296 students in their first semester of university. For two weeks, participants either…

  • Understanding gender and age differences in language use: Cross-cultural insights from Weibo and Facebook

    Open AccessDandan Pang, Sharath Chandra Guntuku et al.ARTICLEHumanities and Social Sciences…2025

    This study integrates social role theory and socioemotional selectivity theory to investigate the cultural universalities and differences in language use among male and female users across different age groups on Weibo and Facebook. By analyzing social media language, we aim to understand how gender and age influence linguistic patterns and reflect broader cultural norms and societal values. Aggregated language from Weibo and Facebook users ( N =…

  • Historical patterns of rice farming explain modern-day language use in China and Japan more than modernization and urbanization

    Open AccessSharath Chandra Guntuku, Thomas Talhelm et al.ARTICLEHumanities and Social Sciences…2024

    We used natural language processing to analyze a billion words to study cultural differences on Weibo, one of China’s largest social media platforms. We compared predictions from two common explanations about cultural differences in China (economic development and urban-rural differences) against the less-obvious legacy of rice versus wheat farming. Rice farmers had to coordinate shared irrigation networks and exchange labor to cope with higher l…

  • Measuring Causal Effects of Civil Communication without Randomization

    Open AccessTony Liu, Lyle Ungar et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the International…2024

    Understanding the causal effects of civility is critical when analyzing online social communication, yet measuring causality is difficult. A/B tests and other randomized experiments are the gold standard for establishing causal effects but they are inapplicable in this setting due to 1) the inability to control civility levels in an experiment, and more importantly, 2) ethical constraints on intentionally randomizing civility levels. We develop a…

  • A deep learning approach to personality assessment: Generalizing across items and expanding the reach of survey-based research

    Open AccessSuhaib Abdurahman, Huy Vu et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality and Social…2024Cited by: 2

    Traditional methods of personality assessment, and survey-based research in general, cannot make inferences about new items that have not been surveyed previously. This limits the amount of information that can be obtained from a given survey. In this article, we tackle this problem by leveraging recent advances in statistical natural language processing. Specifically, we extract "embedding" representations of questionnaire items from deep neural…

  • Beyond beliefs: Multidimensional aspects of religion and spirituality in language

    David B Yaden, Sabina Giorgi et al.ARTICLEPsychology of Religion and…2023

    Religion and spirituality are multidimensional constructs including practices, rituals, and experiences, though they are often treated solely in terms of belief. In this study (N = 2,389), we investigate dimensions examined in previous linguistic analysis studies—religious affiliation and experiences of unity—and new dimensions: religious services, prayer, meditation, and religious/spiritual experience. We replicate previous findings related to t…

  • Characterizing empathy and compassion using computational linguistic analysis

    David B Yaden, Sabina Giorgi et al.ARTICLEEmotion2023

    Many scholars have proposed that feeling what we believe others are feeling-often known as "empathy"-is essential for other-regarding sentiments and plays an important role in our moral lives. Caring for and about others (without necessarily sharing their feelings)-often known as "compassion"-is also frequently discussed as a relevant force for prosocial motivation and action. Here, we explore the relationship between empathy and compassion using…

  • Insights into the accuracy of social scientists' forecasts of societal change

    Open AccessThe Forecasting Collaborative, Igor Grossmann et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2023Cited by: 3References: 58

  • Getting “clean” from nonsuicidal self-injury: Experiences of addiction on the subreddit r/selfharm

    Open AccessMcKenzie Himelein-Wachowiak, Sabina Giorgi et al.ARTICLEJournal of Behavioral Addictions2022

  • Dynamics of sadness by race, ethnicity, and income following George Floyd's death

    Open AccessJielu Lin, Philip Shaw et al.ARTICLESSM - Mental Health2022

  • Regional personality assessment through social media language

    Open AccessSabina Giorgi, Khoa Le Nguyen et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality2022

    OBJECTIVE: We explore the personality of counties as assessed through linguistic patterns on social media. Such studies were previously limited by the cost and feasibility of large-scale surveys; however, language-based computational models applied to large social media datasets now allow for large-scale personality assessment. METHOD: We applied a language-based assessment of the five factor model of personality to 6,064,267 U.S. Twitter users. …

  • Life under stay-at-home orders: A panel study of change in social interaction and emotional wellbeing among older Americans during Covid-19 pandemic

    Open AccessJielu Lin, M Zajdel et al.ARTICLEBMC Public Health2022

    During the pandemic, social interactions are protective and lack of stability in feeling supported makes older adults vulnerable to stress. Efforts should focus on (re)building and maintaining companionship and support to mitigate the pandemic's negative impact

  • Evidence against risk as a motivating driver of Covid-19 preventive behaviors in the United States

    Open AccessMae K Fullerton, Nathaniel Rabb et al.ARTICLEJournal of Health Psychology2022Cited by: 6References: 32

    Does an individual's risk profile predict their social distancing and mask wearing in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic? Common sense and some health behavior theories suggest that as a perceived threat increases, an individual should be more likely to take preventive measures. We explore this hypothesis using survey responses collected from 1114 U.S. adults during April and October 2020, and find that neither perceived nor actual risk predic…

  • The emotional and mental health impact of the murder of George Floyd on the US population

    Open AccessJohannes C Eichstaedt, Garrick T Sherman et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the National…2021

    Significance On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black American male, was murdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis. Footage of his death was widely shared and caused widespread protests. Using data from Gallup before and after his death, we found an unprecedented level of anger and sadness in the population, particularly among Black Americans. Using US Census data, we found that, compared to White Americans, Black Americans reporte…

  • The rural–urban stress divide: Obtaining geographical insights through Twitter

    Open AccessKokil Jaidka, Sharath Chandra Guntuku et al.ARTICLEComputers in Human Behavior2021

  • Information-seeking vs. sharing: Which explains regional health? An analysis of Google Search and Twitter trends

    Open AccessKokil Jaidka, Johannes C Eichstaedt et al.ARTICLETelematics and Informatics2021

  • (Un)happiness and voting in U.S. presidential elections

    George Ward, Jan‐emmanuel De Neve et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality and Social…2021

    A rapidly growing literature has attempted to explain Donald Trump's success in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a result of a wide variety of differences in individual characteristics, attitudes, and social processes. We propose that the economic and psychological processes previously established have in common that they generated or electorally capitalized on unhappiness in the electorate, which emerges as a powerful high-level predictor …

  • The language of character strengths: Predicting morally valued traits on social media

    Open AccessDandan Pang, Johannes C Eichstaedt et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality2020

    Objective Social media is increasingly being used to study psychological constructs. This study is the first to use Twitter language to investigate the 24 Values in Action Inventory of Character Strengths, which have been shown to predict important life domains such as well‐being. Method We use both a top‐down closed‐vocabulary (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and a data‐driven open‐vocabulary (Differential Language Analysis) approach to analy…

  • Cultural Differences in Tweeting about Drinking Across the US

    Open AccessSabina Giorgi, David B Yaden et al.ARTICLEInternational Journal of…2020

    Excessive alcohol use in the US contributes to over 88,000 deaths per year and costs over $250 billion annually. While previous studies have shown that excessive alcohol use can be detected from general patterns of social media engagement, we characterized how drinking-specific language varies across regions and cultures in the US. From a database of 38 billion public tweets, we selected those mentioning "drunk", found the words and phrases disti…

  • (Not) hearing happiness: Predicting fluctuations in happy mood from acoustic cues using machine learning

    Aaron C Weidman, Jessie Sun et al.ARTICLEEmotion2019

    Recent popular claims surrounding virtual assistants suggest that computers will soon be able to hear our emotions. Supporting this possibility, promising work has harnessed big data and emergent technologies to automatically predict stable levels of one specific emotion, happiness, at the community (e.g., counties) and trait (i.e., people) levels. Furthermore, research in affective science has shown that nonverbal vocal bursts (e.g., sighs, gasp…

  • Facebook language predicts depression in medical records

    Open AccessJohannes C Eichstaedt, Robert J Smith et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the National…2018

    Significance Depression is disabling and treatable, but underdiagnosed. In this study, we show that the content shared by consenting users on Facebook can predict a future occurrence of depression in their medical records. Language predictive of depression includes references to typical symptoms, including sadness, loneliness, hostility, rumination, and increased self-reference. This study suggests that an analysis of social media data could be u…

  • The Language of Religious Affiliation: Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Differences

    Open AccessDavid B Yaden, Johannes C Eichstaedt et al.ARTICLESocial Psychological and…2018

    Religious affiliation is an important identifying characteristic for many individuals and relates to numerous life outcomes including health, well-being, policy positions, and cognitive style. Using methods from computational linguistics, we examined language from 12,815 Facebook users in the United States and United Kingdom who indicated their religious affiliation. Religious individuals used more positive emotion words ( β = .278, p

  • An Online Risk Index for the Cross-Sectional Prediction of New HIV Chlamydia, and Gonorrhea Diagnoses Across U.S. Counties and Across Years

    Open AccessMan-Pui Sally Chan, Sophie Lohmann et al.ARTICLEAIDS and Behavior2018

  • Real Men Don’t Say “Cute”: Using Automatic Language Analysis to Isolate Inaccurate Aspects of Stereotypes

    Open AccessJordan Carpenter, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro et al.ARTICLESocial Psychological and…2017

    People associate certain behaviors with certain social groups. These stereotypical beliefs consist of both accurate and inaccurate associations. Using large-scale, data-driven methods with social media as a context, we isolate stereotypes by using verbal expression. Across four social categories—gender, age, education level, and political orientation—we identify words and phrases that lead people to incorrectly guess the social category of the wr…

  • Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation With Language

    Open AccessGregory Park, H Andrew Schwartz et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality2017

    Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and it is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring temporal orientation through language expressed on social media. Judges rated the temporal orientation of 4,302 social media messages. We trained a classifier based on these ratings, which could accurate…