Tracking and Analyzing Public Emotion Evolutions During COVID-19: A Case Study from the Event-Driven Perspective on Microblogs

Qi Li, Cong Wei, Jianning Dang, Lei Cao and Li Liu
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Qi Li: Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Cong Wei: Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Jianning Dang: Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Lei Cao: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100085, China
Li Liu: Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 18, 1-24

Abstract: Objective: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused substantial panic worldwide since its outbreak in December 2019. This study uses social networks to track the evolution of public emotion during COVID-19 in China and analyzes the root causes of these public emotions from an event-driven perspective. Methods: A dataset was constructed using microblogs (n = 125,672) labeled with COVID-19-related super topics (n = 680) from 40,891 users from 1 December 2019 to 17 February 2020. Based on the skeleton and key change points of COVID-19 extracted from microblogging contents, we tracked the public’s emotional evolution modes (accumulated emotions, emotion covariances, and emotion transitions) by time phase and further extracted the details of dominant social events. Results: Public emotions showed different evolution modes during different phases of COVID-19. Events about the development of COVID-19 remained hot, but generally declined, and public attention shifted to other aspects of the epidemic (e.g., encouragement, support, and treatment). Conclusions: These findings suggest that the public’s feedback on COVID-19 predated official accounts on the microblog platform. There were clear differences in the trending events that large users (users with many fans and readings) and common users paid attention to during each phase of COVID-19.

Keywords: public emotion; disaster response; microblog; event extraction; sentiment mining (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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