An Examination of Eating Experiencies in Relation to Psychological States, Loneliness, and Depression Using BERT

Abstract

For humans, meals are significant, not only to intake nutrients or satisfaction, but also to feel connected with family and society through interpersonal communication. The purpose of this study is to estimate and examine psychological states and traits from texts describing eating experiences using BERT. Texts about positive, negative and neutral eating experiences are collected from 877 crowdworkers, along with their psychological traits (loneliness and depression). The accuracy of 6-label classification of three psychological states x two eating situations (co-eating or eating alone) is 72%. Although the accuracies of binary classification of loneliness and that of depression are around 55%, the accuracies are comparable with those of crowdworkers. These results suggest that estimating psychological traits is more difficult than psychological states from a single text per crowdworker. Further analyses reveal that the fine-tuned BERT classifiers of psychological traits use different language features from human raters.