Tweets with average novelty spread the least. Finally, we observed a U-shaped relationship between the informational novelty and the number of retweets. People trusted health experts on health-related knowledge, especially when it was novel, while influencers were more effective at propagating political discourse. Content novelty further accelerated the spread of these discussion themes. Our results show that health-related information and political discourse propagated faster than personal narratives, economy-related or travel-related news. We analyzed more than eight million randomly selected Twitter posts from the first wave of the pandemic to study the role of the author’s social status (Health Expert or Influencer) and the informational novelty of the tweet in the diffusion of several key types of information. This kind of time-sensitive analyses of large-scale samples of emotional expression have the potential to inform mental health support and risk communication.Īccess to online information has been crucial throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Words that frequently occurred in tweets suggest a shift in topics of conversation across all emotions, from political ones in 2019, to pandemic related issues during the outbreak, including everyday life changes, other people, and health. Our results show some of the most enduring changes in emotional expression observed in long periods of social media data. All emotions changed together with an increase in the stringency of measures during certain weeks of the outbreak. Positive emotions remained relatively stable. Sadness terms rose and anger terms decreased around two weeks later, as social distancing measures were implemented. We observed an early strong upsurge of anxiety-related terms in all countries, which was stronger in countries with stronger increases in cases.

We analyzed the digital traces of emotional expressions in tweets during five weeks after the start of outbreaks in 18 countries and six different languages. Although investigations of responses to tragic one-off events exist, studies on the evolution of collective emotions during a pandemic are missing. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the world's population to sudden challenges that elicited strong emotional reactions. Together, the study underscores the large psychological impacts across the country during the first three months of the crisis.

The psychological shifts were amplified on days when the country’s and cities’ COVID infection growth rates were higher, marking the link between the pandemic and the observed psychological patterns. Converging evidence from survey responses and natural language analysis indicated that people’s ties with family strengthened but that social ties to broader groups (friends, city, and country) weakened. Six weeks after the onset, people’s psychological states stabilized but the COVID-produced changes had not abated. When cities began lockdowns, anxiety levels spiked and sadness increased, and language shifted in ways that revealed people’s attempts to make sense of the situation. In parallel, people’s thinking became more immediate and intuitive rather than analytic. Anxiety levels surged, and positive emotion and anger dropped. As the first COVID warnings emerged but prior to the shelter-in-place directives, people’s attentional focus switched to the impending threat. Overall, large psychological shifts were found that reflected three distinct phases. was analyzed along with surveys from 11,000+ people in the U.S. How did people’s emotions, thought patterns, and social lives change as the pandemic unfolded? The Reddit language of 200,000+ people across 18 cities in the U.S.

The current research sought to understand how the pandemic affected people’s social and psychological states during the first three months after the first U.S. The initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the lives of people across the globe.

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