# Social Media Reveals Urban-Rural Differences in Stress across China

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15726 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15726/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Understanding and Measuring Psychological Stress using Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07430/) (2018)
- [Studying Politeness across Cultures Using English Twitter and Mandarin Weibo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02449/) (2020)
- [Studying Cultural Differences in Emoji Usage across the East and the West](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02671/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Lady and the Tramp Nextdoor: Online Manifestations of Economic Inequalities in the Nextdoor Social Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05232/) (2023)
- [WEIRD ICWSM: How Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic is Social Computing Research?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02090/) (2024)
- [Affective Idiosyncratic Responses to Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09396/) (2022)
- [Historical patterns of rice farming explain modern-day language use in China and Japan more than modernization and urbanization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15352/) (2023)
- [Community Needs and Assets: A Computational Analysis of Community Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13272/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modeling differential stress expressions in urban and rural regions in China can provide a better understanding of the effects of urbanization on psychological well-being in a country that has rapidly grown economically in the last two decades. This paper studies linguistic differences in the experiences and expressions of stress in urban-rural China from Weibo posts from over 65,000 users across 329 counties using hierarchical mixed-effects models. We analyzed phrases, topical themes, and psycho-linguistic word choices in Weibo posts mentioning stress to better understand appraisal differences surrounding psychological stress in urban and rural communities in China; we then compared them with large-scale polls from Gallup. After controlling for socioeconomic and gender differences, we found that rural communities tend to express stress in emotional and personal themes such as relationships, health, and opportunity while users in urban areas express stress using relative, temporal, and external themes such as work, politics, and economics. These differences exist beyond controlling for GDP and urbanization, indicating a fundamentally different lifestyle between rural and urban residents in very specific environments, arguably having different sources of stress. We found corroborative trends in physical, financial, and social wellness with urbanization in Gallup polls.