Americans seem to be bringing more anxiety to the dinner table, or at least to their restaurant reviews. The share of anxiety-related words in Yelp reviews rose by about 20% between 2006 and 2021.
The study is by Balázs Kovács, a professor of management at the Yale School of Management. It was published online in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World on November 7, 2023, as part of a special collection on data visualisation.
Tracking anxiety usually relies on costly surveys or clinical records. Kovács set out to show that free, publicly available review data could do some of the same work, across millions of people and many years.
Seven million reviews and 91 worried words
Kovács used the 2022 Yelp Open Dataset, which holds 6,990,280 reviews by nearly 2 million users. The businesses were in states including Pennsylvania, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee and Missouri, and more than 80% of reviews were about restaurants. After keeping only English reviews of five words or more, about 6.95 million remained.
He counted words from the anxiety list of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary, 91 words and word stems such as “afraid”, “nervous” and “worr”. Each review’s count was divided by its length so long and short reviews could be compared.
A rise across states, prices and new users
The proportion of anxiety words climbed by roughly 20% over the 15 years. The rise appeared in four of the five states with the most reviews; Louisiana showed only a minimal increase after 2013. It appeared at restaurants of every price level, from under $10 to over $61, which Kovács reads as a sign that it cuts across incomes.
Most of the increase came from new cohorts of reviewers, who started out more anxious, rather than from veteran reviewers becoming more anxious over time. Kovács notes that this fits, though it does not prove, research showing anxiety rising especially among young people.
Words for anger and sadness rose only slightly by comparison. That matters, because it suggests reviewers were not simply becoming more emotional in general. The pattern also held when controlling for review length.
Kovács acknowledges the method’s weaknesses: Yelp users are not a random sample, the data lack demographics, and people prone to anxiety may be more likely to write reviews. Still, the code and word list are published in the paper, so anyone can rerun the count on the free dataset.
Study Details:
- Title: Documenting the Rise of Anxiety in the United States across Space and Time by Using Text Analysis of Online Review Data
- Authors: Balázs Kovács
- Journal: Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
- Publication Date: November 7, 2023
- DOI: 10.1177/23780231231207635