Measuring Emotional Wellbeing and Emotional Contagion Through Sentiments and Emotions Evoked by Social Media for COVID-19

Abstract

Social Media acts as a primary source of information, opinion, and news source for millions of individuals every day for over a decade. This has never been as apparent as the global pandemic of COVID-19, wherein a span of more than just a year, the evolution of emotions amongst the users of social media has never been so swift and fickle. This study uses Reddit post-extraction and classifies 60,370 posts between the time frame of February 11th, 2020 to January 26th, 2021 from the two major subreddits of r/COVID and r/COVID19. With the help of the Lexicon Approach, the posts are classified into positive, negative, and neutral sentiment polarities, and then distributive frequencies and valence scores are measured for measuring emotional contagion. The findings reveal that there is a high presence of negative sentiments in the posts, and the increase in sentimental extremities occurred in three time-frames, the initial pandemic stage; the implementation of massive lockdowns stage; and the approval and administration of vaccines stage. It also shows that there is a linear relationship between the valence of exposed stimuli and their response. Emotional contagion is present in both positive as well as negative posts. The important implications can be drawn for the emotional wellbeing, perspective, and contagion of the users of Reddit.