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Background: The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between certainty, positive anticipatory states, and positive feelings by analyzing written narratives collected during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in April 2020. Methods: A total of 1,090 Italian participants were asked to write two narratives (one about the present and one about their representation of the future). The corpus was analyzed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software package. Results: Results showed that during the acute phase of COVID-19, people felt more certainty about the present than about the future. In particular, the appraisal dimension of certainty influenced the elicitation of positive feelings through the effect of positive anticipatory states. People with high levels of certainty about the future experienced positive feelings more frequently. The results also suggest that people find it easier to focus on the present moment and experience positive feelings rather than try to predict the future and generate positive feelings based on those predictions. Conclusions: The study is significant, as it is the first to investigate whether certainty may be a strategy for regulating the specific stressor represented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The results highlighted the importance of certainty in coping with environmental threats and stressors. Copyright © 2023 Biassoni, Balzarotti, Abati, Salducco and Gnerre.
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Background: Despite vaccine availability, vaccine hesitancy has inhibited public health officials' efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Although some US elected officials have responded by issuing vaccine mandates, others have amplified vaccine hesitancy by broadcasting messages that minimize vaccine efficacy. The politically polarized nature of COVID-19 information on social media has given rise to incivility, wherein health attitudes often hinge more on political ideology than science. Objective: To the best of our knowledge, incivility has not been studied in the context of discourse regarding COVID-19 vaccines and mandates. Specifically, there is little focus on the psychological processes that elicit uncivil vaccine discourse and behaviors. Thus, we investigated 3 psychological processes theorized to predict discourse incivility-namely, anxiety, anger, and sadness. Methods: We used 2 different natural language processing approaches: (1) the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count computational tool and (2) the Google Perspective application programming interface (API) to analyze a data set of 8014 tweets containing terms related to COVID-19 vaccine mandates from September 14, 2021, to October 1, 2021. To collect the tweets, we used the Twitter API Tweet Downloader Tool (version 2). Subsequently, we filtered through a data set of 375,000 vaccine-related tweets using keywords to extract tweets explicitly focused on vaccine mandates. We relied on the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count computational tool to measure the valence of linguistic anger, sadness, and anxiety in the tweets. To measure dimensions of post incivility, we used the Google Perspective API. Results: This study resolved discrepant operationalizations of incivility by introducing incivility as a multifaceted construct and explored the distinct emotional processes underlying 5 dimensions of discourse incivility. The findings revealed that 3 types of emotions-anxiety, anger, and sadness-were uniquely associated with dimensions of incivility (eg, toxicity, severe toxicity, insult, profanity, threat, and identity attacks). Specifically, the results showed that anger was significantly positively associated with all dimensions of incivility (all P<.001), whereas sadness was significantly positively related to threat (P=.04). Conversely, anxiety was significantly negatively associated with identity attack (P=.03) and profanity (P=.02). Conclusions: The results suggest that our multidimensional approach to incivility is a promising alternative to understanding and intervening in the psychological processes underlying uncivil vaccine discourse. Understanding specific emotions that can increase or decrease incivility such as anxiety, anger, and sadness can enable researchers and public health professionals to develop effective interventions against uncivil vaccine discourse. Given the need for real-time monitoring and automated responses to the spread of health information and misinformation on the web, social media platforms can harness the Google Perspective API to offer users immediate, automated feedback when it detects that a comment is uncivil.
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Objectives: We used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program to capture the psychological process of Taiwan's primary leaders in the fight against COVID-19. Methods: We analyzed the word usage of the head of the Central Epidemic Command Center in Taiwan, Chen Shih-Chung, and the mayor of Taipei City, Ko Wen-Je, in daily press conferences during the level 3 epidemic alert in 2021. Results: We found that Chen had greater certainty and confidence and focused more on epidemic projections and response. By contrast, Ko was less certain and focused more on the past. In addition, each leader demonstrated significant differences in thinking style and motivation. Chen exhibited higher-level analytical thinking and was driven by the need for affiliation, whereas Ko exhibited dynamic thinking and was driven by the need for power. Conclusion: Our study indicated that these two major leaders faced the pandemic with different focuses, thinking styles, and motivations. Future studies are encouraged to explore how word usage affects the feeling and behavior of listeners. © 2022 Chinese Public Health Association of Taiwan. All rights reserved.
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Scientists and regular citizens alike search for ways to manage the widespread effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While scientists are busy in their labs, other citizens often turn to online sources to report their experiences and concerns and to seek and share knowledge of the virus. The text generated by those users in online social media platforms can provide valuable insights about evolving users' opinions and attitudes. The objective of this research is to analyze text of such user disclosures to study human communication during a pandemic in four primary ways. First, we analyze Twitter tweet information, generated throughout the pandemic, to understand users' communications concerning COVID-19 and how those communications have evolved during the pandemic. Second, we analyze linguistic sentiment concepts (analytic, authentic, clout, and tone concepts) in different Twitter settings (sentiment in tweets with pictures or no pictures and tweets versus retweets). Third, we investigate the relationship between Twitter tweets with additional forms of internet activity, namely, Google searches and Wikipedia page views. Finally, we create and use a dictionary of specific COVID-19-related concepts (e.g., symptom of lost taste) to assess how the use of those concepts in tweets are related to the spread of information and the resulting influence of Twitter users. The analysis showed a surprisingly lack of emotion in the initial phases of the pandemic as people were information seeking. As time progressed, there were more expressions of sentiment, including anger. Further, tweets with and without pictures and/or video had statistically significant differences in text sentiment characteristics. Similarly, there were differences between the sentiment in tweets and retweets and tweets. We also found that Google and Wikipedia searches were predictive of sentiment in the tweets. Finally, a variable representing a dictionary of COVID-related concepts was statistically significant when related to users' Twitter influence score and number of retweets, illustrating the general impact of COVID-19 on Twitter and human communication. Overall, the results provide insights into human communication as well as models of human internet and social media use. These findings could be useful for the management of global challenges beyond, or different from, a pandemic.
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The capturing of social opinions, especially rumors, is a crucial issue in digital public health. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussions of related topics have increased exponentially in social media, with a large number of rumors on the Internet, which highly impede the harmony and sustainable development of society. As human health has never suffered a threat of this magnitude since the Internet era, past studies have lacked in-depth analysis of rumors regarding such a globally sweeping pandemic. This text-based analysis explores the dynamic features of Internet rumors during the COVID-19 pandemic considering the progress of the pandemic as time-series. Specifically, a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model is used to extract rumor topics that spread widely during the pandemic, and the extracted six rumor topics, i.e., "Human Immunity," "Technology R&D," "Virus Protection," "People's Livelihood," "Virus Spreading," and "Psychosomatic Health" are found to show a certain degree of concentrated distribution at different stages of the pandemic. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is used to statistically test the psychosocial dynamics reflected in the rumor texts, and the results show differences in psychosocial characteristics of rumors at different stages of the pandemic progression. There are also differences in the indicators of psychosocial characteristics between truth and disinformation. Our results reveal which topics of rumors and which psychosocial characteristics are more likely to spread at each stage of progress of the pandemic. The findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the changing public opinions and psychological dynamics during the pandemic, and also provide reference for public opinion responses to major public health emergencies that may arise in the future.
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COVID-19 , Social Media , Disinformation , Humans , Pandemics , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has affected individuals with lived experience of eating disorders (EDs), with many reporting higher psychological distress, higher prevalence of ED symptoms, and compensatory behaviors. The COVID-19 pandemic and the health and safety measures taken to contain its spread also disrupted routines and reduced access to familiar coping mechanisms, social support networks, and health care services. Social media and the ED communities on social media platforms have been an important source of support for individuals with EDs in the past. So far, it is unknown how discussions in online ED communities changed as offline support networks were disrupted and people spent more time at home in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to identify changes in language content and style in an online ED community during the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: We extracted posts and their comments from the ED community on the social media website Reddit and concatenated them to comment threads. To analyze these threads, we applied top-down and bottom-up language analysis methods based on topic modeling with latent Dirichlet allocation and 13 indicators from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program, respectively. Threads were split into prepandemic (before March 11, 2020) and midpandemic (after March 11, 2020) groups. Standardized mean differences were calculated to estimate change between pre- and midpandemic threads. RESULTS: A total of 17,715 threads (n=8772, 49.5% prepandemic threads; n=8943, 50.5% midpandemic threads) were extracted from the ED community and analyzed. The final topic model contained 21 topics. CIs excluding zero were found for standardized mean differences of 15 topics and 9 Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count categories covering themes such as ED symptoms, mental health, treatment for EDs, cognitive processing, social life, and emotions. CONCLUSIONS: Although we observed a reduction in discussions about ED symptoms, an increase in mental health and treatment-related topics was observed at the same time. This points to a change in the focus of the ED community from promoting potentially harmful weight loss methods to bringing attention to mental health and treatments for EDs. These results together with heightened cognitive processing, increased social references, and reduced inhibition of negative emotions detected in discussions indicate a shift in the ED community toward a pro-recovery orientation.