Negative Emotion under Haze: An Investigation Based on the Microblog and Weather Records of Tianjin, China

Xuan Sun, Wenting Yang, Tao Sun and Ya Ping Wang
Additional contact information
Xuan Sun: Zhou Enlai School of Government, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China
Wenting Yang: School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Tao Sun: Zhou Enlai School of Government, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China
Ya Ping Wang: School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8RS, UK

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Nowadays, many big cities are suffering from heavy air pollution and continuous haze weather. Compared with the threat on physical health, the influence of haze on people’s mental health is much less discussed in the current literature. Emotion is one of the most important indicators of mental health. To understand the negative impact of haze weather on the emotion of the people, we conducted an investigation based on historical weather records and microblog data in Tianjin, China. Specifically, an emotional thesaurus was generated with a microblog corpus collected from sample data. Based on the thesaurus, the public emotion under haze was statistically described. Then, through correlation analysis and comparative study, the relation and seasonal variation of haze and negative emotion of the public were well discussed. According to the study results, there was indeed a correlation between haze and negative emotion of the public, but the strength of this relationship varied under different conditions. The level of air pollution and weather context were both important factors that influence the mental effects of haze, and diverse patterns of negative emotion expression were demonstrated in different seasons of a year. Finally, for the benefit of people’s mental health under haze, recommendations were given for haze control from the side of government.

Keywords: public emotion; haze; microblog; mental health; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/1/86/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/1/86/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2018:i:1:p:86-:d:194012

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().