People have widely different experiences of being alone. Sometimes being alone is relaxing and restorative other times it gives way to feelings of loneliness. Researchers conceptually distinguish between solitude, which tends to be viewed more positively, and loneliness, which is more negative. However, it is unclear whether these terms are used differently in everyday language. We sought to compare the emotional content of over 19 million tweets containing the terms solitude and lonely/loneliness. Using a computational linguistics approach, we found that solitude tends to be used in more positive and less emotionally activated (i.e., lower arousal) contexts compared to lonely. We also found that the word alone tends to be used somewhat differently from solitude and lonely. These results have implications both for how we understand different experiences of time alone in general and for what kind of language we should use when discussing these experiences.

人们有很多孤独的经历。有时候，独自一人是放松和恢复的，而其他时候它却让孤独感得以解决。研究人员之间的概念性区分孤独，这趋向于被更积极地看待，并且孤独，这是更负的。但是，目前尚不清楚这些术语在日常用语中是否有所不同。我们力求比较超过1900万条推文的情感内容，这些推文包含“孤独”和“孤独/寂寞”两个词。使用计算语言学的方法，我们发现，孤独往往更积极和不那么糟糕的激活（即较低的觉醒）上下文中使用比较寂寞。我们还发现，单独使用这个词的习惯与孤独和寂寞的用法有所不同。这些结果对我们如何理解一般的单独时间体验以及在讨论这些体验时应使用哪种语言都有影响。