Go to [Sep 22] Sex differences and gendered discourse on a forum about anxiety

[Sep 22] Sex differences and gendered discourse on a forum about anxiety

2026-09-22

Join the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine for a public lecture by Professor Paul Baker from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who will discuss how individuals’ understanding and writing of anxiety are filtered through gendered discourses, based on a corpus analysis of 23 million words from the Anxiety Support forum.

Event Details 

Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Time: 16:30 – 18:00 (HKT)

Venue: Room MWT3, G/F, Meng Wah Complex, Main Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109417

We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract

Anxiety is a growing, worldwide phenomenon. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 264 million people living with anxiety and diagnoses of anxiety disorders are more common among women than men (4.6% compared to 2.6% at the global level) (World Health Organization 2017). This talk examines 23 million words of text posted to the Anxiety Support forum of the social networking service Health Unlocked between March 2012 and October 2020, comprising 294,082 separate posts.

The way that people conceptualise feelings or conditions is significant. Chan, Chan and Kwok (2015) found that catastrophising was a positive predictor of anxiety among adolescents while Chen, Chen and Yang (2019) have described a study where individuals who were instructed to anthropomorphise sadness or happiness reported less experience of that emotion afterwards.

A small number of posts were written by people who did not identify as male or female and these posts were read in order to identify patterns or discourses relating to gender and sex identities. Then, lexical differences between male and female posters were retrieved by comparing the two sets of posts against one another to identify keywords and key multi word terms, using the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine. These were categorised by hand and concordances examined to identify 1) how posters characterised anxiety and their relationship to it 2) strategies for managing anxiety 3) reasons for anxiety 4) interactional style on the forum. Additionally, words which explicitly referenced identities (e.g. female, man etc) were also subjected to concordance analyses in order to identify sets of gendered expectations around anxiety. 

The analysis shows trends which indicate that the ways that individuals understand and write about anxiety are filtered through gendered discourses. The findings have implications for the ways that people with anxiety and health practioners attempt to understand and resolve anxiety.

Chan, S.M., Chan, S.K. & Kwok, W.W. (2015) Ruminative and Catastrophizing Cognitive Styles Mediate the Association Between Daily Hassles and High Anxiety in Hong Kong Adolescents. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev 46, 57–66.

Chen, F., Chen, R. P. and Yang, L. (2019) When Sadness Comes Alive, Will It Be Less Painful? The Effects of Anthropomorphic Thinking on Sadness Regulation and Consumption. Journal of Consumer Psychology 30(2): 277-95.

World Health Organisation (2017) Number of people with depression increases. https://www.who.int/bangladesh/news/detail/28-02-2017-number-of-people-with-depression-increases.