Depressed people use the internet differently than others, spending more time chatting online and file-sharing, according to a new study.
The study, which followed 216 college students, monitored actual Internet use and correlated certain patterns with higher scores on depression surveys, Science Daily reported. Earlier, research looking at the link between Internet use and depression depended on people’s memories of what they did and when, said study co-author Sriram Chellappan, an assistant professor of computer science at Missouri University of Science and Technology. While that approach has yielded some interesting and important results, it isn’t as precise as one might like. “If you were asked how many times you looked at your email last month, it would be impossible to give an accurate answer,” Chellappan said. For the new study, Chellappan and his colleagues asked volunteers to fill out surveys that contained several questions designed to ferret out depression symptoms. The questions were asked in such a way that students wouldn’t realize that the researchers were interested in depression levels, Chellappan said. Then, the researchers scrutinized study volunteers’ Internet use by monitoring what they did each time they logged on to the university server.
Chellappan is quick to point out that the surveys and internet monitoring were all done anonymously. Each volunteer was given a pseudonym at the beginning of the study and from that point on they were only identified by their fictitious names.
Chellappan sees the new findings as possibly leading to an early warning system, an alarm that might tell us that we’re becoming depressed.
