Impact Of Emotions on Information Seeking And Sharing Behaviors During Pandemic

TL;DR

This study analyzes how emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic influence public behaviors like seeking and sharing information and complying with health measures, using a novel emotion detection approach on large-scale social data.

Contribution

It introduces a new method combining emotion detection via fine-tuned RoBERTa and behavioral data analysis to study public emotional responses during a crisis.

Findings

Anger and fear were dominant emotions at outbreak start.

Negative emotions correlated with increased information behaviors.

Certain emotions influenced compliance with stay-at-home policies.

Abstract

We propose a novel approach to assess the public's coping behavior during the COVID-19 outbreak by examining the emotions. Specifically, we explore (1) changes in the public's emotions with the COVID-19 crisis progression and (2) the impacts of the public's emotions on their information-seeking, information-sharing behaviors, and compliance with stay-at-home policies. We base the study on the appraisal tendency framework, detect the public's emotions by fine-tuning a pre-trained RoBERTa model, and cross-analyze third-party behavioral data. We demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of our proposed approach in providing a large-scale examination of the publi's emotions and coping behaviors in a real-world crisis: COVID-19. The approach complements prior crisis communication research, mainly based on self-reported, small-scale experiments and survey data. Our results show that anger and fear are more prominent than other emotions experienced by the public at the pandemic's outbreak stage. Results also show that the extent of low certainty and passive emotions (e.g., sadness, fear) was related to increased information-seeking and information-sharing behaviors. Additionally, high-certainty (e.g., anger) and low-certainty (e.g., sadness, fear) emotions during the outbreak correlated to the public's compliance with stay-at-home orders.