Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China.
JMIR Public Health Surveill. 2020 May 22;6(2):e19447. doi: 10.2196/19447.
With the World Health Organization's pandemic declaration and government-initiated actions against coronavirus disease (COVID-19), sentiments surrounding COVID-19 have evolved rapidly.
This study aimed to examine worldwide trends of four emotions-fear, anger, sadness, and joy-and the narratives underlying those emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over 20 million social media twitter posts made during the early phases of the COVID-19 outbreak from January 28 to April 9, 2020, were collected using "wuhan," "corona," "nCov," and "covid" as search keywords.
Public emotions shifted strongly from fear to anger over the course of the pandemic, while sadness and joy also surfaced. Findings from word clouds suggest that fears around shortages of COVID-19 tests and medical supplies became increasingly widespread discussion points. Anger shifted from xenophobia at the beginning of the pandemic to discourse around the stay-at-home notices. Sadness was highlighted by the topics of losing friends and family members, while topics related to joy included words of gratitude and good health.
Overall, global COVID-19 sentiments have shown rapid evolutions within just the span of a few weeks. Findings suggest that emotion-driven collective issues around shared public distress experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic are developing and include large-scale social isolation and the loss of human lives. The steady rise of societal concerns indicated by negative emotions needs to be monitored and controlled by complementing regular crisis communication with strategic public health communication that aims to balance public psychological wellbeing.
随着世界卫生组织宣布新冠疫情大流行以及各国政府针对新型冠状病毒疾病（COVID-19）采取的行动，人们对 COVID-19 的看法迅速发生变化。
本研究旨在考察 COVID-19 大流行期间全球范围内四种情绪（恐惧、愤怒、悲伤和喜悦）的趋势以及这些情绪背后的叙事。
在 2020 年 1 月 28 日至 4 月 9 日 COVID-19 爆发的早期阶段，使用“武汉”、“冠状”、“nCov”和“covid”作为搜索关键字，共收集了超过 2000 万条社交媒体推特帖子。
在疫情期间，公众情绪从恐惧迅速转变为愤怒，同时悲伤和喜悦也浮现出来。词云的结果表明，对 COVID-19 检测和医疗用品短缺的担忧成为越来越广泛的讨论点。愤怒从疫情开始时的仇外情绪转变为围绕居家令的讨论。悲伤的主题是失去朋友和家人，而与喜悦相关的主题包括感恩和身体健康的话语。
总体而言，COVID-19 情绪在短短几周内发生了迅速变化。研究结果表明，围绕 COVID-19 大流行期间公众共同的痛苦经历，情绪驱动的集体问题正在发展，包括大规模的社会隔离和生命损失。负面情绪所表明的社会关注的稳步上升需要通过定期的危机沟通来监测和控制，并通过旨在平衡公众心理幸福感的战略公共卫生沟通来补充。
