Abstract:

Objective We propose a multimodal model integrating social media text and image data for automated assessment of psychological stress in college students to support the development of intelligent mental health services in higher education institutions. Methods Based on deep learning technology, we designed an evaluation framework comprising a text sentiment modeling module, an image sentiment modeling module, and a multimodal fusion prediction module. Text sentiment features were extracted using Bi-LSTM, and image semantic cues were extracted via U-Net. A feature concatenation strategy was used to enable cross-modal semantic collaboration to achieve automatic identification of 3 psychological stress levels: mild, moderate, and severe. We constructed a multimodal annotated dataset using social platform data from 1577 students across multiple universities in Guangdong Province. After data cleaning, 252 samples were randomly selected for model training and testing. Results In the 3-classification task, the model demonstrated outstanding performance on the test set, and achieved an accuracy of 92.86% and an F1 score of 0.9276, exhibiting excellent stability and consistency. Confusion matrix analysis further revealed the model's ability to effectively distinguish between different pressure levels. Conclusion The multimodal psychological stress assessment model developed in this study effectively integrates unstructured social behavior data to enhance the scientific rigor and practical applicability of psychological state recognition, and thus provides support for developing intelligent psychological service systems.

Key words: college students' psychological stress, multimodal data fusion, automated assessment, deep learning, social media sentiment analysis