Sponsor
This work was supported by U.S. National Institutes of Health grants K01 DA0046697 (MM) and R21 DA048175 (JT). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Published In
Plos One
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-24-2024
Subjects
Cannibis Use -- Research, Cannabis -- Physiological effect
Abstract
Social media data provide unprecedented access to discussions of active, naturalistic, and often real-time cannabis use in an era of cannabis policy liberalization. The aim of this study was to explore psychological and environmental correlates of cannabis effects by applying computational social science approaches to a large dataset of unprompted reports of naturalistic cannabis use with corresponding self-reported numerical ratings of subjective highness. Post title text was extracted via the Pushshift dataset from N = 328,865 posts to the r/trees Reddit community, where posters self-assess and disclose how high they feel on a scale from 1 to 10 (M = 6.9, SD = 1.8). Structural topic modelling and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary-based approaches were applied to identify (1) frequently discussed topics and (2) text indicative of 5 psychological processes (affective, social, cognitive, perceptual, biological), respectively, as well as to examine relationships between subjective highness and (1) topic prevalence and (2) psychological process word counts. A 40-topic model was selected for interpretation based on semantic coherence and exclusivity. The most discussed topics in a 40-topic model were characterized by references to smoking places, social contexts, positive affect, cognitive states, as well as food and media consumed. In LIWC dictionary analyses, words mentioning affective, social, and cognitive processes were referenced more often than perceptual or body processes. Posters reported greater subjective highness when using language that referred to in-person social environments and lower subjective highness when using language that referred to online social environments and positive affect psychological states. This examination of unprompted online reports of naturalistic cannabis use identified textual content referring to affect and to other people as being associated with perceived effects of cannabis. These affective and social aspects of the cannabis use experience were salient to active posters in this online community and should be integrated into experience sampling methods and behavioral pharmacology research, as well as public health messaging.
Rights
Copyright: © 2024 Meacham et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0300290
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42222
Citation Details
Meacham, M. C., Nobles, A. L., Bone, C. ‘CB,’ Gilbert, M., & Thrul, J. (2024). The Reddit cannabis subjective highness rating scale: Applying computational social science to explore psychological and environmental correlates of naturalistic cannabis use. PLOS ONE, 19(6), e0300290.