The “return” after the holiday break is the most critical moment of the week, but the real surprise is the coincidence of the psychological state with health events
Black Monday? It doesn’t really have a good reputation on the first day of the week, which coincides with the resumption of work after relaxation, pleasures, and for many probably also the less controlled behaviors of the weekend. To try to understand if Monday’s bad reputation is just a stereotype or if it corresponds to reality, Eric Mayor of the Institute of work and organizational psychology of the University of Neuchâtel and Lucas Bietti, of the Department of psychology of the Norwegian University of science and technology , they thought of carry out a check using the emotional tone and emoticons of the messages that appear on Twitter as a reference.
The study on moods
Their study, published in Royal Society Open Science, he analyzed seven million messages referring to oneself and one’s mood and 18 million referring instead to the moods of relatives and friends. The researchers were thus able to discover, for example, that people tend to be friendlier starting Thursday afternoon, but then, when Sunday afternoon arrives, a worsening of mood is evident. From a Leopardian point of view, we are already thinking of the return to “used labor” and this has an effect on the affective quality of the words used. The analysis of the messages on Twitter shows that we have to wait until Tuesday afternoon to see the use of words with positive connotations from a psychological point of view return in a fairly widespread manner. The analysis of the emoticons also confirmed the expression of negative emotions starting from Sunday until about the middle of the week, both in tweets that related to themselves and in those related to other people.
Weekly rhythm and pathologies
While the body’s daily cyclicality is very well understood by circadian rhythm studies, less well known is lat a weekly rhythm, partly biological, partly to be considered the result of social, work, religious and cultural organization. In fact, for some diseases the existence of a tendentially weekly trend has been reported, with a peak that tends to be positioned between Monday and Tuesday. Data in this sense are there for various cardiovascular disorders, which tend to take people to the hospital mostly early in the week. This happens, for example, for hypertensive crises, arrhythmias, worsening of heart failure, Takotsubo syndrome (the so-called heartbreak syndrome), strokes and transient cerebral ischemic attacks. In the Internet searches on health topics are also concentrated in the first days of the week, when the most searched words are “flu”, “sexually transmitted diseases”, “diabetes” and “menopause”“.
From Monday I get in line …
Monday is also the day when most people try to quit smoking, as was shown by both a US research published in Jama, and from an analysis carried out on the search terms used on Google. There is probably a relationship between the more relaxed and hedonistic behaviors of the weekend and this kind of psychological “repentance” on Monday.
After ten, the mood worsens
The study published in Royal Society Open Science then shows that there is also one daily mood variability, whereby the Twitter messages that have been analyzed tend to reflect better moods until ten in the morning, when there is a worsening, perhaps related to the problems that one begins to encounter in the work activity. The interest in this study arises not only from its results, which largely respond to what is intuitively expected, but also from the fact that they demonstrate how a social network can represent a reliable source for psychological research, which allows to use enough easily large amounts of data on emotions and moods from real populations, rather than on laboratory studies.
Conditions of health and psychological well-being
Data that can represent a basis for interventions aimed at increasing psychological well-being. “In fact, positive psychological states are associated with better health conditions and higher scores on the subjective well-being scales,” say the authors of the research. “People who report a positive mood on self-surveys generally also have more established social networks. In the workplace, a positive mood allows you to predict some kind of emotional contagion between workers and customers while those who have a prevalence of negative moods are also less active from a physical point of view and more predisposed to precarious health conditions. A delay in the healing of wounds and a worsening in the course of chronic diseases, as well as a lower adherence to the prescribed treatments were also noted “. Social media could therefore truly be considered a mirror of the psychological health of groups of people or entire populations, becoming an important knowledge tool for the targeted launch of public health initiatives.
December 18, 2021 (change December 18, 2021 | 09:19)
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