Workshop Proceedings of the 20th International
AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Workshop: Digital Minds 2026:Assessing the interplay of social media on mental health
DOI: 10.36190/2026.26Studies on intergenerational relationships between parents and children in Asian American families highlight their impact on mental health and well-being. This study investigates the role of ambivalent emotions in online narratives shared by Asian and Asian American children on the subreddit, r/Asianparentstories. By employing a BERT-based model to detect emotions at the sentence level and depressive symptoms at the post level, we examine how mixed feelings relate to depressive symptoms. First, among 28 detectable emotions, eight (realization, approval, sadness, anger, curiosity, annoyance, disappointment, disapproval) comprise over 50%; these eight emotions frequently co-occur with one another and with less common emotions. Second, we find the co-occurrence of multiple emotions, showing that individual posts contain combinations of positive and negative emotions rather than exclusively positive or negative affect. Finally, our findings indicate that emotion pairs involving at least one negative emotion (e.g., nervousness-remorse and annoyance-relief) are more strongly associated with depressive symptoms, whereas emotion pairs that do not include negative emotions show mixed associations with depressive symptoms. These findings demonstrate the value of computational emotion classification and the need to account for emotional ambivalence when studying parent-child relationship dynamics and mental health.