  The state of being alone can have a substantial impact on our lives, though
experiences with time alone diverge significantly among individuals.
Psychologists distinguish between the concept of solitude, a positive state of
voluntary aloneness, and the concept of loneliness, a negative state of
dissatisfaction with the quality of one's social interactions. Here, for the
first time, we conduct a large-scale computational analysis to explore how the
terms associated with the state of being alone are used in online language. We
present SOLO (State of Being Alone), a corpus of over 4 million tweets
collected with query terms 'solitude', 'lonely', and 'loneliness'. We use SOLO
to analyze the language and emotions associated with the state of being alone.
We show that the term 'solitude' tends to co-occur with more positive,
high-dominance words (e.g., enjoy, bliss) while the terms 'lonely' and
'loneliness' frequently co-occur with negative, low-dominance words (e.g.,
scared, depressed), which confirms the conceptual distinctions made in
psychology. We also show that women are more likely to report on negative
feelings of being lonely as compared to men, and there are more teenagers among
the tweeters that use the word 'lonely' than among the tweeters that use the
word 'solitude'.
