Abstract
The massive impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has left no one indifferent, becoming an unprecedented challenge. The use of protections such as sanitary masks has become increasingly common, restrictions in our daily lives, such as social distancing or confinements, have had serious consequences on the economy and our welfare state. Although the measures imposed throughout the world follow the same pattern, they have been applied with different criteria depending on the country. Over extended periods of time, people tend to change their perception of an event and its magnitude, or in other words, they stop being so concerned despite the seriousness of the matter. In this paper, we introduce a new metric to quantify the degree of emotional concern of people being affected by a topic, and we confirm how populations from different countries follow this trend of downplaying the effect of the pandemic and reach a state of indifference. To do this, we propose a method to analyze the social media stream over time extracting the different emotional states from the Russel Circumplex plane and computing the shifting created by the tragic event—the pandemic. We complete this metric by incorporating searching behavior to reflect not only push contents but also pull inquiries. The resulting metric establishes a relationship between the pandemic and the emotional response by defining the degree of Emotional Concern. Although the method can be applied to any location with a significant and varied amount of geo-localized social media streams, the scope of this paper covers the most representative cities in Europe.
Highlights
Since its first appearance at the end of 2019, the outbreak of the virus COVID-19 [1] led to a global pandemic, responsible for a dramatic loss of human life around the world [2] and still not under control, presenting an unprecedented challenge in our daily lives, as well as for public health, food systems, services, and the world’s economy [3,4]
We propose a methodology to quantify the gradual level of indifference and numbness of the population to a prolonged event in time, by introducing what we called the degree of emotional concern
We introduce the concepts of: (a) Searching Behavior, an index that collects the variation in the trends of terms relative to a topic, (b) degree of Emotional Concern, the indicator that we developed that will allow us to measure the level of concern of people with respect to a prolonged event in time
Summary
Since its first appearance at the end of 2019, the outbreak of the virus COVID-19 [1] led to a global pandemic, responsible for a dramatic loss of human life around the world [2] and still not under control, presenting an unprecedented challenge in our daily lives, as well as for public health, food systems, services, and the world’s economy [3,4]. We have not focused our experiment on data centered around the event in question, meaning we did not use specific keywords in the data collection This allows us to obtain a more general view of the emotional state of users, being able to measure the impact of the event on the daily life of the population over time. According to Twitter usage statistics, only 12.3% of its active users are over 49 years old [22] It is for this reason that we decided to include the trends of these terms because, while maintaining the premise that the vast majority of the population is capable of interacting through the internet, the group at greatest risk, in this case, is the least represented, so using these trends can help us measure public attentiveness and map it to the emotional response [23]. We will finish our paper by presenting our conclusions, as well as future lines of research to take forward this work
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
