Institute of Nature Conservation, Polish Academy of Sciences, 31-120 Kraków, Poland.
Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals, Polish Academy of Sciences, 31-016 Kraków, Poland.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Oct 10;19(19):12969. doi: 10.3390/ijerph191912969.
COVID-19 expanded rapidly throughout the world, with enormous health, social, and economic consequences. Mental health is the most affected by extreme negative emotions and stress, but it has been an underestimated part of human life during the pandemic. We hypothesized that people may have responded to the pandemic spontaneously with increased interest in and creation of funny internet memes. Using Google and Google Trends, we revealed that the number of and interest in funny internet memes related to COVID-19 exploded during the spring 2020 lockdown. The interest in coronavirus memes was positively correlated with interest in mortality due to COVID-19 on a global scale, and positively associated with the real number of deaths and cases reported in different countries. We compared content of a random sample of 200 coronavirus memes with a random sample of 200 non-coronavirus memes found on the Internet. The sentiment analysis showed that coronavirus memes had a similar proportion of positive and negative words compared to non-coronavirus memes. However, an internet questionnaire revealed that coronavirus memes gained higher funniness scores than a random sample of non-coronavirus memes. Our results confirm that societies may have turned to humor to cope with the threat of SARS-CoV-2.
COVID-19 在全球范围内迅速蔓延，造成了巨大的健康、社会和经济后果。心理健康受到极端负面情绪和压力的影响最大，但在大流行期间，它一直是人类生活中被低估的一部分。我们假设，人们可能会自发地对大流行做出反应，对有趣的网络模因产生更多的兴趣和创作。我们使用谷歌和谷歌趋势，揭示了与 COVID-19 相关的有趣网络模因的数量和兴趣在 2020 年春季封锁期间爆发式增长。对冠状病毒模因的兴趣与全球范围内因 COVID-19 导致的死亡率呈正相关，与不同国家报告的实际死亡人数和病例数呈正相关。我们比较了在互联网上随机抽取的 200 个冠状病毒模因和 200 个非冠状病毒模因的内容。情感分析表明，冠状病毒模因与非冠状病毒模因相比，积极和消极词汇的比例相似。然而，一项网络问卷调查显示，冠状病毒模因的趣味性得分高于随机抽取的非冠状病毒模因样本。我们的研究结果证实，社会可能已经转向幽默来应对 SARS-CoV-2 的威胁。
