How People Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of Emotional Expressions from US and India
It provides insights into public emotional responses to the pandemic for researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
This study analyzed over 54 million tweets from the US and India during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine emotional expressions, finding significant country differences and temporal changes in fear, anger, and happiness, with fear declining and other emotions fluctuating until trends reversed in early 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed millions of lives worldwide and elicited heightened emotions. This study examines the expression of various emotions pertaining to COVID-19 in the United States and India as manifested in over 54 million tweets, covering the fifteen-month period from February 2020 through April 2021, a period which includes the beginnings of the huge and disastrous increase in COVID-19 cases that started to ravage India in March 2021. Employing pre-trained emotion analysis and topic modeling algorithms, four distinct types of emotions (fear, anger, happiness, and sadness) and their time- and location-associated variations were examined. Results revealed significant country differences and temporal changes in the relative proportions of fear, anger, and happiness, with fear declining and anger and happiness fluctuating in 2020 until new situations over the first four months of 2021 reversed the trends. Detected differences are discussed briefly in terms of the latent topics revealed and through the lens of appraisal theories of emotions, and the implications of the findings are discussed.