Are you the type of person who spends hours every day thinking up of a perfect/witty status update just to get your Facebook friends to pay attention to you? Well, you might be revealing way more than you think.



According to a new study, researchers can now determine psychological traits simply by analyzing the wording of a person's Facebook status updates.

For the study, researchers focused on three personality traits - psychopathy, narcissism, and manipulativeness — which psychologists consider to be undesirable and socially damaging.

After receiving the results of the personality test, they then analyzed the text of the subjects status updates based upon an algorithm designed by Lund University's Sverker Sikström which measures the significance of specific words. The status results were combined with basic information about the user's profile, such as the frequency of status updates and the number of Facebook friends.

Those who tested positive for psychopathy tended to post "negatively charged or odd formulations more often," including posts that mentioned explicit violent or sexual content. Those with narcissistic traits tended to post frequently about their own good characteristics as acts of self-promotion.

Based on the findings, the wealth of data provided by Facebook users may open the door to new way of analyzing personality for researchers.

[Business Insider]