Exploring linguistic features and user engagement in Chinese online mental health counseling

• Published in: Heliyon 2024-10, Vol.10 (19), p.e38042, Article e38042
• Main Authors: Zhang, Liyuan, Liu, Dexi, Li, Jing, Wan, Changxuan, Liu, Xiping
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Language modeling; Linguistic style matching; Online mental health counseling; The topics of questions and answers; Vocabulary categories
• ISSN: 2405-8440; 2405-8440
• DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e38042

With the popularity of online mental health platforms, more individuals are seeking help and receiving social support by openly discussing their problems. Therefore, it's crucial to gain a deeper understanding of which problem disclosures and social support on these platforms can attract more user attention and engagement. Previous research has primarily focused on social media forums. Our work concentrates on the professional mental health platform, intending to understand the linguistic features present in posts that promote user engagement and interaction. We employ text mining and deep learning techniques to analyze posts consisting of 22,250 questions from help-seekers and 78,328 answers providing social support extracted from the Chinese online mental health counseling platform. Initially, we analyze the high-frequency words and topics of the questions and answers to gain insights into the primary focal points and the range of topics covered in these posts. The results indicate that work-related issues are the most concerning and troublesome for help-seekers, and the topics that users follow are approximately 8 types, including growth, family, in-love, marriage, emotions, human-relations, behavioral-therapy and career. Subsequently, we analyze the language usage in question-and-answer posts with different engagement from three aspects: vocabulary categories, linguistic style matching, and language modeling, aiming to identify which linguistic features can attract more user attention and engagement. The results reveal that high-engagement answer posts exhibit a higher degree of linguistic style matching with the corresponding questions, and the use of vocabulary categories also influences the attention and engagement of the posts. By exploring the linguistic features and patterns displayed in posts with different levels of engagement on the professional online mental health platform, this study offers deep insights into user behavior and the factors that impact counseling effectiveness on the platform and provides valuable knowledge for understanding effective user interactions and engagement. •We construct a Chinese mental health dataset consisting of questions and answers provided by help-seekers and psychological supporters, which comprises single-turn Q&A dialogues with the form of long-text.•We discover that on the professional Chinese online mental health counseling platform, users' questions are mainly in eight categories: human-relations, fami