COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?

Piotr Skórka (), Beata Grzywacz, Dawid Moroń and Magdalena Lenda
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Piotr Skórka: Institute of Nature Conservation, Polish Academy of Sciences, 31-120 Kraków, Poland
Beata Grzywacz: Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals, Polish Academy of Sciences, 31-016 Kraków, Poland
Dawid Moroń: Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals, Polish Academy of Sciences, 31-016 Kraków, Poland
Magdalena Lenda: Institute of Nature Conservation, Polish Academy of Sciences, 31-120 Kraków, Poland

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 19, 1-24

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: COVID-19; entertainment; extreme negative emotions; the internet; healing; health; humor; mental health; recovery; stress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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