Abstract

Terrorist attacks pose significant threats to mental health. There is dearth information about the impact of consecutive terrorist attacks on space-time concentrations of emotional reactions. This study collected (1) Twitter data following the two terrorist attacks in London in March and June of 2017, respectively, and (2) deprivation data at small areal levels in the United Kingdom. The space-time permutation model was used to detect the significant clusters of negative emotions, including fear, sadness, and anger in tweets. Logistic regression models were used to examine the social deprivation of communities associated with negative tweeting. The results reported two significant clusters after the March attack, one was in London, ten days after the attack, and the other was far from the attack site between Manchester and Birmingham, three days after the attack. Attention to the reoccurring attack in June diminished quickly. The socially deprived communities experienced double disadvantage—sending fewer tweets but expressing more negative emotions than their counterparts. The findings suggest that terrorism can affect public emotions far and broad. There is a potential for surveillance to rapidly identify geographically concentrated emotions after consecutive or prolonged disasters using social media data.

Highlights

  • Terrorism continues on all scales [1,2] and has substantial consequences on mental health in public [3,4,5]

  • The findings suggest that terrorism can affect public emotions far and broad

  • This study analyzed the geotagged Twitter data in the United Kingdom to identify the clusters of negative emotional reactions in space and time

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Summary

Introduction

Terrorism continues on all scales [1,2] and has substantial consequences on mental health in public [3,4,5]. Research to date has documented a variety of short- or long-term mental health effects in the aftermath of disasters [6,7]. Social media data have seen their increased usage in disaster research, such as terrorist attacks [3,11,12], earthquakes [13,14], and hurricanes [15,16]. As a rich crowdsource of data, these social media platforms have contributed substantially to the understanding of news, thoughts, and ideas among social media users after disasters [11,16]. Social media messages- provide great potential to understand emotions during and after terrorist attacks

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