How Epidemic Psychology Works on Twitter: Evolution of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S
Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia, Ke Zhou, Marios Constantinides,, Sanja \v{S}\'cepanovi\'c, Sagar Joglekar

TL;DR
This study analyzes 122 million COVID-19 related tweets in the U.S. during 2020 to empirically validate Strong's epidemic psychology model, revealing three distinct psycho-social phases of public response to the pandemic.
Contribution
It provides a large-scale empirical validation of Strong's psycho-social epidemic model using Twitter data and identifies distinct phases of public response during COVID-19.
Findings
Identified three phases: refusal, anger, and acceptance.
Observed cyclic re-emergence of anger with COVID-19 waves.
Demonstrated real-time operationalization of epidemic psychology.
Abstract
Disruptions resulting from an epidemic might often appear to amount to chaos but, in reality, can be understood in a systematic way through the lens of "epidemic psychology". According to Philip Strong, the founder of the sociological study of epidemic infectious diseases, not only is an epidemic biological; there is also the potential for three psycho-social epidemics: of fear, moralization, and action. This work empirically tests Strong's model at scale by studying the use of language of 122M tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic posted in the U.S. during the whole year of 2020. On Twitter, we identified three distinct phases. Each of them is characterized by different regimes of the three psycho-social epidemics. In the refusal phase, users refused to accept reality despite the increasing number of deaths in other countries. In the anger phase (started after the announcement of the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Media Influence and Health · Mental Health via Writing
