Happiness and Sadness in Adolescents’ Instagram Direct Messaging: A Neural Topic Modeling Approach

We investigated the expressions of happiness and sadness in adolescents’ direct messages (DMs) on Instagram. Using neural topic modeling ( BERTopic ), we analyzed 211,778 DMs belonging to 96 adolescents, who donated data from 101 Instagram accounts. Results showed that (1) expressions of happiness were more than four times more prevalent than expressions of sadness; (2) the number of DMs containing expressions of happiness and expressions of sadness were highly correlated; (3) there are temporal trends in the expression of happiness and sadness in adolescents’ DMs, and there are individual differences in these trends; and (4) there is no significant between- or within-person relationship between the number of DMs containing expressions of happiness and sadness and adolescents’ well-being.