Public emotion responses during COVID ‐19 in China on social media: An observational study

COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019) has attacked many countries around world and caused profound impacts on public life. The outbreak of pandemic and other relevant factors are considered to cause emotion responses of residents. And the emotion responses of individuals are crucial for the execution of the prevention and control measures. By analyzing the linguistic features of posts on social media, this study aims to explore the change of public emotion responses during COVID-19 in China. We sampled 22,423 Weibo users and collected their Weibo posts by provincial area each day from January 1st, 2020 to April 18th, 2020. Next, we extracted linguistic features from posts according to the emotion-related dictionary. Based on important news and information released by the national and international organizations of public health, we divided the period from January 1st, 2020 to April 18th, 2020 into four stages (the initial period, the outbreak period, the stable period, and the prevention and control period). Then we gathered linguistic features by stage. After that, ANOVA was performed to examine the differences among these four stages. The results showed that the frequencies of 11 word categories showed significant differences among four stages, including fear, disappointment, guilt, missing, anger, panic, blessing, faith, love, praise, and surprise. The uses of several negative emotion words, such as fear, disappointment, guilt, and anger, increased saliently in the outbreak period compared with the initial period. Besides, panic words decreased significantly in the prevention and control period compared with the outbreak period. However, missing words were used more in the prevention and control period than other three periods. Moreover, people expressed more faith words and less love words in the outbreak period than the initial periods. Besides, people used more blessing words in the outbreak period compared with the stable period and prevention and control period. And praise words were used more in the outbreak period and the stable period compared with the initial period. The frequency of surprise words was significantly low only in the initial period. This study contributed to the understanding of public emotion responses during COVID-19, and had implications for the evidence-based execution of prevention and control measures.