Exploring Gender Differences in Chronic Pain Discussions on Reddit

TL;DR

This study uses NLP to analyze gender differences in chronic pain discussions on Reddit, revealing linguistic, condition prevalence, and medication response disparities between males and females.

Contribution

It introduces a novel HAM-CNN model for classifying gender in pain-related posts and provides new insights into gender-specific pain experiences on social media.

Findings

Female posts are more emotionally focused.

Migraine and sinusitis are more common among females.

Gender influences responses to pain medication.

Abstract

Pain is an inherent part of human existence, manifesting as both physical and emotional experiences, and can be categorized as either acute or chronic. Over the years, extensive research has been conducted to understand the causes of pain and explore potential treatments, with contributions from various scientific disciplines. However, earlier studies often overlooked the role of gender in pain experiences. In this study, we utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze and gain deeper insights into individuals' pain experiences, with a particular focus on gender differences. We successfully classified posts into male and female corpora using the Hidden Attribute Model-Convolutional Neural Network (HAM-CNN), achieving an F1 score of 0.86 by aggregating posts based on usernames. Our analysis revealed linguistic differences between genders, with female posts tending to be more emotionally focused. Additionally, the study highlighted that conditions such as migraine and sinusitis are more prevalent among females and explored how pain medication affects individuals differently based on gender.