In a computer science task of predicting well-being from Reddit posts, we used psychological language features such as mental health, implicit motives and resilience and were more accurate than half of all teams.

Accuracy with explainability! #CLPsych2025

aclanthology.org/2025.clpsych...

6/7 In the R package text (www.r-text.org), you can easily apply these models with a single command (after you installed text), for free, without sharing data with any third party #rstats ##rtext👇👇👇

5/7 We let three rested experts recode sentences where our models strongly disagreed with the original coders. In 85% of the cases, the new coders agreed with the models, indicating that the models are more accurate than humans. 💻👈

4/7 YES, our models, trained with data from German people 2010-2020, generalized to US data FROM 1949, with completely different picture cues and gender distributions. 😱😎

3/7 Using language models and machine learning, we created automated implicit motive codings that agreed stronger with the average expert coder than how expert coders generally agree with each other in three different holdout sets 🎯

🎺 Publication in JPSP 🎺
1/7 We automated the coding procedure of the implicit motives of power, achievement and affiliation with at least as high accuracy as human coders while being 99% faster! 🎯⚡️

Article: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

#personality
#AI
#NLProc
@apajournals.bsky.social

6/8
How people define them:

Harmony = relationships—mostly social 👥, but also with nature 🌳 and the world 🌍.

Balance = life’s big picture—work 💼, family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦, self , etc.

Distinct patterns in people’s words. 🔍

pbs.twimg.com/media/GjbJwQ...

5/8
Key finding #2:
Where you live matters 🗺️

Preference for balance = stronger in sparsely populated countries (e.g., Australia 🇦🇺)

Preference for harmony = stronger in densely populated countries (e.g., Singapore 🇸🇬)

More people around you? Harmony matters more. 🫂

pbs.twimg.com/media/GjbI5Y...

4/8
Key finding #1:

People define harmony more positively than balance. (based on predicted valence in the definitions!)

BUT—more people prefer to be in balance (58.3%) 🤯than in harmony.
Positivity ≠ preference.

pbs.twimg.com/media/GjbIzq...