School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, United States of America.
Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 16;17(6):e0269315. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0269315. eCollection 2022.
Natural disasters can have devastating and long-lasting effects on a community's emotional well-being. These effects may be distributed unequally, affecting some communities more profoundly and possibly over longer time periods than others. Here, we analyze the effects of four major US hurricanes, namely, Irma, Harvey, Florence, and Dorian on the emotional well-being of the affected communities and regions. We show that a community's emotional response to a hurricane event can be measured from the content of social media that its population posted before, during, and after the hurricane. For each hurricane making landfall in the US, we observe a significant decrease in sentiment in the affected areas before and during the hurricane followed by a rapid return to pre-hurricane baseline, often within 1-2 weeks. However, some communities exhibit markedly different rates of decline and return to previous equilibrium levels. This points towards the possibility of measuring the emotional resilience of communities from the dynamics of their online emotional response.
自然灾害可能对社区的情绪健康产生破坏性和持久的影响。这些影响可能分布不均，某些社区受到的影响可能比其他社区更严重，持续时间也可能更长。在这里，我们分析了美国四大飓风（即伊尔玛、哈维、佛罗伦萨和多里安）对受灾社区和地区情绪健康的影响。我们表明，可以从飓风事件发生前后社区人口在社交媒体上发布的内容中衡量社区对飓风事件的情绪反应。对于在美国登陆的每一次飓风，我们都观察到在飓风来临前和期间，受灾地区的情绪明显下降，随后迅速恢复到飓风前的基线水平，通常在 1-2 周内。然而，一些社区表现出明显不同的下降和恢复到以前平衡水平的速度。这表明可以从社区在线情绪反应的动态来衡量社区的情绪弹性。
