The Impact of COVID-19 Epidemic Declaration on Psychological Consequences: A Study on Active Weibo Users

By Sijia Li, Yilin Wang, Jia Xue, Nan Zhao, T. Zhu. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020

1,601 citations recorded by the source corpus.

COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019) has significantly resulted in a large number of psychological consequences. The aim of this study is to explore the impacts of COVID-19 on people’s mental health, to assist policy makers to develop actionable policies, and help clinical practitioners (e.g., social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists) provide timely services to affected populations. We sample and analyze the Weibo posts from 17,865 active Weibo users using the approach of Online Ecological Recognition (OER) based on several machine-learning predictive models. We calculated word frequency, scores of emotional indicators (e.g., anxiety, depression, indignation, and Oxford happiness) and cognitive indicators (e.g., social risk judgment and life satisfaction) from the collected data. The sentiment analysis and the paired sample t-test were performed to examine the differences in the same group before and after the declaration of COVID-19 on 20 January, 2020. The results showed that negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, depression and indignation) and sensitivity to social risks increased, while the scores of positive emotions (e.g., Oxford happiness) and life satisfaction decreased. People were concerned more about their health and family, while less about leisure and friends. The results contribute to the knowledge gaps of short-term individual changes in psychological conditions after the outbreak. It may provide references for policy makers to plan and fight against COVID-19 effectively by improving stability of popular feelings and urgently prepare clinical practitioners to deliver corresponding therapy foundations for the risk groups and affected people.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6dc849c7cbb84fc67ca435dcc740797f309a0ae

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Conséquences psychopathologiques du confinement (2020, background): “[87] Li S, Wang Y, Xue J, Zhao N, Zhu T.”
Psychosocial impact of COVID-19 (2020, positive): “Another study, based on the approach of Online Ecological Recognition (OER), analyzedWeibo posts from almost 18000 activeWeibo users and determined that negative emotions, for example ‘anxiety, depression and indignation,’ have been increased after declaration of COVID-19 on January 20, 2020, while ”
Twitter Discussions and Emotions About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Machine Learning Approach (2020, background): “Comparison With Prior Work Our findings are consistent with previous studies using social media data to assess the public health responses and sentiments related to COVID-19, and suggest that public attention has been focusing on the following topics since January 2020: (1) the confirmed cases and d”
Gender-related differences in the psychological impact of confinement as a consequence of COVID-19 in Spain (2020, background): “…levels of stress and anxiety, insomnia and irritability and loneliness (Balluerka et al. 2020; Brooks, et al., 2020; Bu, Steptoe, & Fancourt, 2020; González-Sanguino et al., 2020; Ko et al. 2020; Li et al., 2020; Lima et al., 2020; Wang et al. 2020a; Romero et al. 2020; Shelef & Zalsman, 2020).”
Sentiment analysis and its applications in fighting COVID-19 and infectious diseases: A systematic review (2020, background): “…2018; Ji et al., 2013; Zarrad et al., 2014) or even the development of a regularly updated atlas of infectious diseases (Chaudhary & Naaz, 2017; S. Li et al., 2020); and assisting in urgent interventional care (Bhat et al., 2020; Pastor, 2020; Seltzer et al., 2017) and proper management of time…”