scholarly journals Collective Emotions during the COVID-19 Outbreak

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Metzler ◽  
Bernard Rimé ◽  
Max Pellert ◽  
Thomas Niederkrotenthaler ◽  
Anna Di Natale ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the world's population to sudden challenges that elicited strong emotional reactions. Although investigations of responses to tragic one-off events exist, studies on the evolution of collective emotions during a pandemic are missing. We analyzed the digital traces of emotional expressions in tweets during five weeks after the start of outbreaks in 18 countries and six different languages. We observed an early strong upsurge of anxiety-related terms in all countries, which was stronger in countries with stronger increases in cases. Sadness terms rose and anger terms decreased around two weeks later, as social distancing measures were implemented. Positive emotions remained relatively stable. All emotions changed together with an increase in the stringency of measures during certain weeks of the outbreak. Our results show some of the most enduring changes in emotional expression observed in long periods of social media data. Words that frequently occurred in tweets suggest a shift in topics of conversation across all emotions, from political ones in 2019, to pandemic related issues during the outbreak, including everyday life changes, other people, and health. This kind of time-sensitive analyses of large-scale samples of emotional expression have the potential to inform mental health support and risk communication.

IEEE Access ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 114851-114861 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiguang Zhou ◽  
Xinlong Zhang ◽  
Xiaoyun Zhou ◽  
Yuhua Liu

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 633-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Pasek ◽  
Colleen A. McClain ◽  
Frank Newport ◽  
Stephanie Marken

Researchers hoping to make inferences about social phenomena using social media data need to answer two critical questions: What is it that a given social media metric tells us? And who does it tell us about? Drawing from prior work on these questions, we examine whether Twitter sentiment about Barack Obama tells us about Americans’ attitudes toward the president, the attitudes of particular subsets of individuals, or something else entirely. Specifically, using large-scale survey data, this study assesses how patterns of approval among population subgroups compare to tweets about the president. The findings paint a complex picture of the utility of digital traces. Although attention to subgroups improves the extent to which survey and Twitter data can yield similar conclusions, the results also indicate that sentiment surrounding tweets about the president is no proxy for presidential approval. Instead, after adjusting for demographics, these two metrics tell similar macroscale, long-term stories about presidential approval but very different stories at a more granular level and over shorter time periods.


Author(s):  
Suppawong Tuarob ◽  
Conrad S. Tucker

The authors of this work propose a Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) model for predicting product market adoption and longevity using large scale, social media data. Social media data, available through sites such as Twitter® and Facebook®, have been shown to be leading indicators and predictors of events ranging from influenza spread, financial stock market prices, and movie revenues. Being ubiquitous and colloquial in nature allows users to honestly express their opinions in a unified, dynamic manner. This makes social media a relatively new data gathering source that can potentially appeal to designers and enterprise decision makers aiming to understand consumers response to their upcoming/newly launched products. Existing design methodologies for leveraging large scale data have traditionally relied on product reviews available on the internet to mine product information. However, such web reviews often come from disparate sources, making the aggregation and knowledge discovery process quite cumbersome, especially reviews for poorly received products. Furthermore, such web reviews have not been shown to be strong indicators of new product market adoption. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how social media can be used to predict and mine information relating to product features, product competition and market adoption. In particular, the authors analyze the sentiment in tweets and use the results to predict product sales. The authors present a mathematical model that can quantify the correlations between social media sentiment and product market adoption in an effort to compute the ability to stay in the market of individual products. The proposed technique involves computing the Subjectivity, Polarity, and Favorability of the product. Finally, the authors utilize Information Retrieval techniques to mine users’ opinions about strong, weak, and controversial features of a given product model. The authors evaluate their approaches using the real-world smartphone data, which are obtained from www.statista.com and www.gsmarena.com.


Author(s):  
Xiaomo Liu ◽  
Armineh Nourbakhsh ◽  
Quanzhi Li ◽  
Sameena Shah ◽  
Robert Martin ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. e001190
Author(s):  
Adrian Ahne ◽  
Francisco Orchard ◽  
Xavier Tannier ◽  
Camille Perchoux ◽  
Beverley Balkau ◽  
...  

IntroductionLittle research has been done to systematically evaluate concerns of people living with diabetes through social media, which has been a powerful tool for social change and to better understand perceptions around health-related issues. This study aims to identify key diabetes-related concerns in the USA and primary emotions associated with those concerns using information shared on Twitter.Research design and methodsA total of 11.7 million diabetes-related tweets in English were collected between April 2017 and July 2019. Machine learning methods were used to filter tweets with personal content, to geolocate (to the USA) and to identify clusters of tweets with emotional elements. A sentiment analysis was then applied to each cluster.ResultsWe identified 46 407 tweets with emotional elements in the USA from which 30 clusters were identified; 5 clusters (18% of tweets) were related to insulin pricing with both positive emotions (joy, love) referring to advocacy for affordable insulin and sadness emotions related to the frustration of insulin prices, 5 clusters (12% of tweets) to solidarity and support with a majority of joy and love emotions expressed. The most negative topics (10% of tweets) were related to diabetes distress (24% sadness, 27% anger, 21% fear elements), to diabetic and insulin shock (45% anger, 46% fear) and comorbidities (40% sadness).ConclusionsUsing social media data, we have been able to describe key diabetes-related concerns and their associated emotions. More specifically, we were able to highlight the real-world concerns of insulin pricing and its negative impact on mood. Using such data can be a useful addition to current measures that inform public decision making around topics of concern and burden among people with diabetes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 376 ◽  
pp. 244-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiguang Zhou ◽  
Xinlong Zhang ◽  
Zhiyong Guo ◽  
Yuhua Liu

2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Suppawong Tuarob ◽  
Conrad S. Tucker

Lead users play a vital role in next generation product development, as they help designers discover relevant product feature preferences months or even years before they are desired by the general customer base. Existing design methodologies proposed to extract lead user preferences are typically constrained by temporal, geographic, size, and heterogeneity limitations. To mitigate these challenges, the authors of this work propose a set of mathematical models that mine social media networks for lead users and the product features that they express relating to specific products. The authors hypothesize that: (i) lead users are discoverable from large scale social media networks and (ii) product feature preferences, mined from lead user social media data, represent product features that do not currently exist in product offerings but will be desired in future product launches. An automated approach to lead user product feature identification is proposed to identify latent features (product features unknown to the public) from social media data. These latent features then serve as the key to discovering innovative users from the ever increasing pool of social media users. The authors collect 2.1 × 109 social media messages in the United States during a period of 31 months (from March 2011 to September 2013) in order to determine whether lead user preferences are discoverable and relevant to next generation cell phone designs.


Author(s):  
Yunwei Zhao ◽  
Can Wang ◽  
Chi-Hung Chi ◽  
Kwok-Yan Lam ◽  
Sen Wang

The availability of massive social media data has enabled the prediction of people’s future behavioral trends at an unprecedented large scale. Information cascades study on Twitter has been an integral part of behavior analysis. A number of methods based on the transactional features (such as keyword frequency) and the semantic features (such as sentiment) have been proposed to predict the future cascading trends. However, an in-depth understanding of the pros and cons of semantic and transactional models is lacking. This paper conducts a comparative study of both approaches in predicting information diffusion with three mechanisms: retweet cascade, url cascade, and hashtag cascade. Experiments on Twitter data show that the semantic model outperforms the transactional model, if the exterior pattern is less directly observable (i.e. hashtag cascade). When it becomes more directly observable (i.e. retweet and url cascades), the semantic method yet delivers approximate accuracy (i.e. url cascade) or even worse accuracy (i.e. retweet cascade). Further, we demonstrate that the transactional and semantic models are not independent, and the performance gets greatly enhanced when combining both.


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