Microblog data analysis of emotional reactions to COVID-19 in China
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Jin Y
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9245366 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic raised wide concern from all walks of life globally. Social media platforms became an important channel for information dissemination and an effective medium for public sentiment transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic.ObjectiveMining and analyzing social media text information can not only reflect the changes in public sentiment characteristics during the COVID-19 pandemic but also help the government understand the trends in public opinion and reasonably control public opinion.MethodsFirst, this study collected microblog comments related to the COVID-19 pandemic as a data set. Second, sentiment analysis was carried out based on the topic modeling method combining latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). Finally, a machine learning linear regression (ML-LR) model combined with a sparse matrix was proposed to explore the evolutionary trend in public opinion on social media and verify the high accuracy of the model.ResultsThe experimental results show that, in different stages, the characteristics of public emotion are different, and the overall trend is from negative to positive.ConclusionsThe proposed method can effectively reflect the characteristics of the different times and space of public opinion. The results provide theoretical support and practical reference in response to public health and safety events.
| S-EPMC10833090 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:The outbreak of COVID-19 generated severe emotional reactions, and restricted mobility was a crucial measure to reduce the spread of the virus. This study describes the changes in public emotional reactions and mobility patterns in the Chinese population during the COVID-19 outbreak. METHODS:We collected data on public emotional reactions in response to the outbreak through Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, between 1st January and 31st March 2020. Using anonymized location-tracking information, we analyzed the daily mobility patterns of approximately 90% of Sichuan residents. RESULTS:There were three distinct phases of the emotional and behavioral reactions to the COVID-19 outbreak. The alarm phase (19th-26th January) was a restriction-free period, characterized by few new daily cases, but a large amount public negative emotions [the number of negative comments per Weibo post increased by 246.9 per day, 95% confidence interval (CI) 122.5-371.3], and a substantial increase in self-limiting mobility (from 45.6% to 54.5%, changing by 1.5% per day, 95% CI 0.7%-2.3%). The epidemic phase (27th January-15th February) exhibited rapidly increasing numbers of new daily cases, decreasing expression of negative emotions (a decrease of 27.3 negative comments per post per day, 95% CI -40.4 to -14.2), and a stabilized level of self-limiting mobility. The relief phase (16th February-31st March) had a steady decline in new daily cases and decreasing levels of negative emotion and self-limiting mobility. CONCLUSIONS:During the COVID-19 outbreak in China, the public's emotional reaction was strongest before the actual peak of the outbreak and declined thereafter. The change in human mobility patterns occurred before the implementation of restriction orders, suggesting a possible link between emotion and behavior.
| S-EPMC7542325 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Much valuable information is embedded in social media posts (microposts) which are contributed by a great variety of persons about subjects that of interest to others. The automated utilization of this information is challenging due to the overwhelming quantity of posts and the distributed nature of the information related to subjects across several posts. Numerous approaches have been proposed to detect topics from collections of microposts, where the topics are represented by lists of terms such as words, phrases, or word embeddings. Such topics are used in tasks like classification and recommendations. The interpretation of topics is considered a separate task in such methods, albeit they are becoming increasingly human-interpretable. This work proposes an approach for identifying machine-interpretable topics of collective interest. We define topics as a set of related elements that are associated by having posted in the same contexts. To represent topics, we introduce an ontology specified according to the W3C recommended standards. The elements of the topics are identified via linking entities to resources published on Linked Open Data (LOD). Such representation enables processing topics to provide insights that go beyond what is explicitly expressed in the microposts. The feasibility of the proposed approach is examined by generating topics from more than one million tweets collected from Twitter during various events. The utility of these topics is demonstrated with a variety of topic-related tasks along with a comparison of the effort required to perform the same tasks with words-list-based representations. Manual evaluation of randomly selected 36 sets of topics yielded 81.0% and 93.3% for the precision and F1 scores respectively.
| S-EPMC7418982 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How does the public react to information about the likely progression of COVID-19 cases in the United States? How do these reactions vary over the course of the pandemic and by partisanship, and with what consequences for policy attitudes and personal behavior? We argue that reading projections about the peak of COVID-19 cases in the United States is likely to lead to increased levels of anxiety and sadness. We expect that these effects will be more pronounced and less polarized along partisan lines earlier in the pandemic. Finally, we expect that elevated anxiety and sadness should in turn lead to greater support for protective policies to combat the pandemic and a greater inclination to engage in protective behaviors. To test these arguments, we fielded online survey experiments at three points in time (April, June, and August 2020), in which respondents were randomly assigned to a control group or one of two projections about the likely progression of COVID-19 cases in the United States. Across all three waves, we find that exposure to information about case peaks increases anxiety and sadness, though the effects get weaker over time, particularly among Republicans. We also find evidence that these elevated emotional responses increase support for protective policies and behavior.
| S-EPMC9880625 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionThe ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (ChAd), mRNA-1273 (m1273), MVC-COV1901 (MVC), and BNT162b2 (BNT) COVID-19 vaccines received authorization for emergency use in Taiwan beginning in February 2021. We investigated acute reactions to homologous primary COVID-19 vaccination series in adults aged ≥ 18 years.MethodsIn this prospective observational study based on smartphone data (Taiwan V-Watch), we calculated the frequencies of self-reported local and systemic acute reactions within 7 days of a COVID-19 vaccination, and the health effects up to 3 weeks after each dose. Those who reported adverse reactions after both doses were assessed by the McNemar test.ResultsDuring 22 March 2021-13 December 2021, 77,468 adults were enrolled; 59.0 % were female and 77.8 % were aged 18-49 years. For both doses of all four vaccines, the local and systemic reactions were minor in severity and highest on days 1 and 2 after vaccination, and declined markedly until day 7. For 65,367 participants who provided data after the first and second doses, systemic reactions were more frequent after dose 2 of the BNT and m1273 vaccines (McNemar tests: both p < 0.001), while local reactions were more frequent after dose 2 of the m1273 and MVC vaccines (both p < 0.001), compared with dose 1 of the homologous vaccine. Among the participants aged 18-49 years, the percentage who missed work on the day after vaccination was slightly higher among women (9.3 %) than among men (7.0 %).ConclusionsAcute reactogenicity and impact of work absenteeism for the four COVID vaccines in the V-Watch survey were mild and of short duration.
| S-EPMC10043967 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe new coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been accompanied by severe psychological pressure on the entire population. However, little is known about how this pandemic could affect the more vulnerable population with severe mental illness.AimsTo explore adolescent psychiatric inpatients' perceptions, emotional reactions and needs during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsIndividual in-depth interviews were conducted with nine psychiatric inpatients aged 12-17 years. Through open-ended questions, interviewers initiated five themes: (a) knowledge about coronavirus pandemic, (b) changes in everyday routine due to the pandemic, (c) adolescents' feelings about the pandemic, (d) adolescents' positive thoughts and behaviors, and (e) how the social environment can help adolescents deal with the pandemic-related situation. A thematic analysis was conducted using line-by-line open coding.ResultsRegarding their knowledge of the impact of the current pandemic, almost all adolescents focused on information about the nature of coronavirus and on existing crisis management practices. Almost all patients identified predominantly negative changes due to the quarantine state, including restrictions on both social life and personal freedom as well as excessive contact with family members during home isolation. As far as their emotions were concerned, adolescents did acknowledge anxiety about self-harm and harming their loved ones as well as mood swings within the family nucleus; anxiety was also manifested about the unknown and the management of the pandemic in other countries. Avoidance of thought rumination about the coronavirus and its consequences, positive thinking and looking towards the future were reported as constructive strategies for coping with challenging emotions. Additionally, a sense of belongingness seems to have been playing a pivotal role in the adolescents coping strategies. Trust in the authorities and the community was another quite noteworthy point that emerged during the interviews. Lastly, our findings indicated adolescents' benefit from receiving balanced health messaging coupled with balanced thinking within their social and family environment.ConclusionsEnhanced comprehension of possible mediating psychological pathways is needed to help clinicians, researchers, and decision-makers to avert the deterioration of mental disorders and overall functioning, as well as additional stress-related disorders.
| S-EPMC8316878 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study presents a survey dataset describing families' conditions during the COVID-19 isolation period obtained from individuals who serve as parents. A survey was conducted to measure the family's positive or negative emotional reactions and the degree of their resilience. The data were categorized into age, sex, type of family, family size, length of marriage, family's environment, and family COVID-19 status. The samples were gathered from 365 parents of Indonesian students who were willing to fill an online questionnaire. SPSS v.23.0 was used to carry out descriptive statistics and intercorrelations. Additional results from chi-square analyses are available as supplemental tables in the Mendeley repository.
| S-EPMC7324925 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The vaccine is still the best clinical measure for effective prevention and control of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The vaccine-associated ocular adverse reactions should be noted in detail among the medical community. We reported twelve eyes of 9 patients presented at the Department of Ophthalmology, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University from March to August 2021 with ocular complaints following COVID-19 vaccination. The main inclusion criterion was the development of ocular symptoms within 14 days after receiving a dose of an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine. The mean (SD) age was 44.7 ± 16.5 years (range, 19-78 years), among which seven (77.8%) cases were women. The mean time of ocular adverse events was 7.1 days (range, 1-14 days) after receiving the inactivated COVID-19 vaccine. One patient was diagnosed with choroiditis, 1 with uveitis, 4 with keratitis, 1 with scleritis, 1 with acute retinal necrosis, and 1 with iridocyclitis. Although the causal relationship between vaccines and ocular adverse events cannot be established from this case series report, physicians should pay attention to the ocular adverse reactions following the COVID-19 vaccine administration.
| S-EPMC8801805 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe fight against the COVID-19 pandemic seems to encompass a social media debate, possibly resulting in emotional contagion and the need for novel surveillance approaches. In the current study, we aimed to examine the flow and content of tweets, exploring the role of COVID-19 key events on the popular Twitter platform.MethodsUsing representative freely available data, we performed a focused, social media-based analysis to capture COVID-19 discussions on Twitter, considering sentiment and longitudinal trends between January 19 and March 3, 2020. Different populations of users were considered. Core discussions were explored measuring tweets' sentiment, by both computing a polarity compound score with 95% Confidence Interval and using a transformer-based model, pretrained on a large corpus of COVID-19-related Tweets. Context-dependent meaning and emotion-specific features were considered.ResultsWe gathered 3,308,476 tweets written in English. Since the first World Health Organization report (January 21), negative sentiment proportion of tweets gradually increased as expected, with amplifications following key events. Sentiment scores were increasingly negative among most active users. Tweets content and flow revealed an ongoing scenario in which the global emergency seems difficult to be emotionally managed, as shown by sentiment trajectories.ConclusionsIntegrating social media like Twitter as essential surveillance tools in the management of the pandemic and its waves might actually represent a novel preventive approach to hinder emotional contagion, disseminating reliable information and nurturing trust. There is the need to monitor and sustain healthy behaviors as well as community supports also via social media-based preventive interventions.
| S-EPMC7943954 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundWuhan, China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, imposed citywide lockdown measures on January 23, 2020. Neighboring cities in Hubei Province followed suit with the government enforcing social distancing measures to restrict the spread of the disease throughout the province. Few studies have examined the emotional attitudes of citizens as expressed on social media toward the imposed social distancing measures and the factors that affected their emotions.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was twofold. First, we aimed to detect the emotional attitudes of different groups of users on Sina Weibo toward the social distancing measures imposed by the People's Government of Hubei Province. Second, the influencing factors of their emotions, as well as the impact of the imposed measures on users' emotions, was studied.MethodsSina Weibo, one of China's largest social media platforms, was chosen as the primary data source. The time span of selected data was from January 21, 2020, to March 24, 2020, while analysis was completed in late June 2020. Bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) was used to analyze users' emotions, while logistic regression analysis was employed to explore the influence of explanatory variables on users' emotions, such as age and spatial location. Further, the moderating effects of social distancing measures on the relationship between user characteristics and users' emotions were assessed by observing the interaction effects between the measures and explanatory variables.ResultsBased on the 63,169 comments obtained, we identified six topics of discussion-(1) delaying the resumption of work and school, (2) travel restrictions, (3) traffic restrictions, (4) extending the Lunar New Year holiday, (5) closing public spaces, and (6) community containment. There was no multicollinearity in the data during statistical analysis; the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit was 0.24 (χ28=10.34, P>.24). The main emotions shown by citizens were negative, including anger and fear. Users located in Hubei Province showed the highest amount of negative emotions in Mainland China. There are statistically significant differences in the distribution of emotional polarity between social distancing measures (χ220=19,084.73, P<.001), as well as emotional polarity between genders (χ24=1784.59, P<.001) and emotional polarity between spatial locations (χ24=1659.67, P<.001). Compared with other types of social distancing measures, the measures of delaying the resumption of work and school or travel restrictions mainly had a positive moderating effect on public emotion, while traffic restrictions or community containment had a negative moderating effect on public emotion.ConclusionsFindings provide a reference point for the adoption of epidemic prevention and control measures, and are considered helpful for government agencies to take timely actions to alleviate negative emotions during public health emergencies.
| S-EPMC7968412 | biostudies-literature