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Age and Affect in Language: How Emotion Expression on Social Media Varies Across Adulthood

Paper · 2026 · Daniela Teodorescu, Jan Philip Wahle and Saif M. Mohammad

Summary

Psychology research disagrees on how emotional well-being changes over adulthood. Some studies report a U-shape, others an inverted U, and others no change. Most of this evidence comes from surveys, which are small and prone to bias, and it usually measures only valence. The authors offer a corpus-based alternative. They release AgeCorpus, a set of Reddit (2010–2022) and Twitter (2020–2021) posts labelled with the author's age when the post was written. Ages come from regex-detected self-declarations, such as stating one's current age or birth year. With simple, interpretable methods, they compare posting habits (frequency, pronoun use, popular subreddits) and emotion expression across age groups from 13–19 to 70–79. They cover valence, arousal and dominance as well as categorical emotions.

The two platforms partly diverge. Valence rises until midlife and then falls on both. Arousal declines on Reddit but levels off on Twitter. Dominance forms an inverted U on Reddit and grows with age on Twitter. Categorical emotions peak in midlife on Reddit and intensify with age on Twitter. The resource complements survey-based well-being research.

Key points

  • Resource: AgeCorpus has a Reddit part and a Twitter part (the TUSC-City subset). Both are built from existing platform dumps rather than API scraping, and the corpus is also included in the larger ABCDE corpus (Wahle et al., 2026).
  • Age labelling: regex patterns match self-statements of age or birth date, such as "I'm 30" or "born in 1998".
  • Scale: Table 5 gives post counts for seven age bands. These add up to roughly 33M Reddit posts and about 1.9M TUSC-City posts. The 20–29 and 30–39 bands dominate on Reddit, and the older bands are much smaller.
  • Affect findings (VAD):
    • Valence follows an inverted U on both platforms.
    • Arousal falls with age on Reddit and plateaus on Twitter.
    • Dominance follows an inverted U on Reddit and rises on Twitter.
  • Availability: the code and data are released on GitHub (dteodore/Age — Affect_AgeCorpus).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🏛️National Research Council CanadaOttawa · Canada59 works · 21,677 citations🎓University of AlbertaEdmonton · Canada44 works · 3,236 citations🎓University of GöttingenGöttingen · Germany17 works · 158 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksSocial Psychology · 306 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Sentiment & emotion · 972 works

Cite

Cite as Daniela Teodorescu, Jan Philip Wahle and Saif M. Mohammad. 2026. Age and Affect in Language: How Emotion Expression on Social Media Varies Across Adulthood. Proceedings of Computational Affective Science (CAS) @ LREC 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/4upe8aqpk5kx

@inproceedings{teodorescu2026age,
  title = {{Age and Affect in Language: How Emotion Expression on Social Media Varies Across Adulthood}},
  author = {Daniela Teodorescu, Jan Philip Wahle and Saif M. Mohammad},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Computational Affective Science (CAS) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4upe8aqpk5kx},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4upe8aqpk5kx}
}

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