The words we use on social media can say a lot about who we are. Our age, our gender and even our socioeconomic status.

This week a team of computer scientists and linguists led by Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, a post-doctoral researcher in Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, has found that a person's Twitter history can accurately pinpoint his or her income level.

For the experiment, the scientists looked at 5,191 Twitter handles and more than 10 million tweets. "It's the largest dataset of its kind for this type of research," said Preotiuc-Pietro. "The dataset enabled us to do something no one has really done before."

According to UPI site:

“To organize their data, scientists used a job code system employed by economists in the United Kingdom, which divides occupation into nine classes, each with average income estimates. From there, the analysts worked backwards from tweets to tweeter, building an algorithm to find words and phrases unique to each class.”

The investigation offered up variety of insights:

• A person’s words can reveal age and gender, and that these are tied to income.
• Those who earn more tend to express more fear and anger on Twitter.
• Perceived optimists have a lower mean income.
• Text from those in lower income brackets includes more swear words, whereas those in higher brackets more frequently discuss politics, corporations and the nonprofit world.
• Lower-income users or those of a lower socioeconomic status use Twitter more as a means of communication among themselves
• High-income people use it more to disseminate news, and they use it more professionally than personally