Russian scientists create a search algorithm for students with increased anxiety

The project is being implemented by a team of psychologists, sociologists, historians and programmers from TSU under the leadership of Associate Professor

Faculty of Psychology Valeria Matsuta.Now, to create a database, scientists have presented online questionnaires available to TSU students. Each respondent can find out his psychological portrait, emotional state and how he uses the Internet.

Now the project database contains data from 1.5 thousand and profiles of Tomsk teenagers. In total, scientists intend to collect data from 10 thousand people. In addition to searching for anxious teenagers, scientists are going to use an algorithm to identify insecure content: self-harm support groups, hate groups (nationalist, extremist, joking).

“We will conduct a series of anonymous psychologicalquestionnaires and scales that demonstrate the level of anxiety and stress of each participant, and identify the relationship between the results and community subscriptions in the personal profile of social networks. Detection of connections (marker communities) will allow predicting the presence of the desired trait in other people. For example, if all people who have been diagnosed and have shown a high level of stress are subscribed to one community, then we can assume that other subscribers of this group who did not pass the diagnosis also have high stress. ”

Project participant Artem Feshchenko         

The procedure for searching the respondent's account in social networksand the connection between the results of the questionnaire and the subscriptions is detected using software algorithms without the direct involvement of a human researcher. Scientists note that this approach is correct from an ethical point of view.