New research suggests that more negative language is used on mobile device tweets than web based tweets.

Researchers at Goldsmiths, Bowdoin College and the University of Maine found that tweets from mobile devices are more likely to employ egocentric language as opposed to non-mobile device Tweets.

"Very little work has been done comparing how our social media activities vary from mobile to non-mobile. And as we increasingly use social media from mobile devices, the context in which one uses social media is a critical object of study," Dhiraj Murthy of Goldsmiths, University of London said in a statement. "Our work is transformative in this understudied field as we found that not all tweets are the same and the source of tweets does influence tweeting patterns, like how we are more likely to tweet with negative language from mobile devices than from web-based ones."

For the study, researcher collected 235 million tweets. Ninety percent of the top sources to access Twitter were coded to denote mobile, non-mobile and mixed sources. Drawing from social psychological methods, they then studied language use in tweets by analyzing the frequency and ratios of words traditionally associated with social and behavioral characteristics.

Researchers found that mobile tweets are not only more egocentric in language than any other group, but that the ratio of egocentric to non-egocentric tweets is consistently greater for mobile tweets than from non-mobile sources. They also did not find that mobile tweets were particularly gendered. Regardless of platform, tweets tended to employ words traditionally associated as masculine.

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Communication.