RESUMO
We present a framework for studying the spillover effect of negative foreign COVID-19 news on attitudes towards immigration. Our framework proposes that exposure to negative COVID-19 news from foreign countries can activate negative associations with foreigners, reduce positive attitudes towards them, and increase perceived threat, ultimately leading to decreased support for immigration. We conducted three studies to test this framework. Study 1 found that exposure to negative COVID-19 news about a foreign country increased negative valence associations with that country. Study 2 showed that exposure to more negative COVID-19 news about foreign countries was associated with lower acceptance of immigration policies in real life. Study 3 replicated the spillover effect of negative news exposure using a scenario manipulation. The effects of negative news exposure on immigration policy acceptance in both Studies 2 and 3 were mediated by changes in foreigner attitudes and intergroup threat. Our results demonstrate the important spillover effect of negative foreign COVID-19 news exposure on immigration attitudes and highlight the association perspective as a foundation for understanding attitude changes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
RESUMO
Objective: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused substantial panic worldwide since its outbreak in December 2019. This study uses social networks to track the evolution of public emotion during COVID-19 in China and analyzes the root causes of these public emotions from an event-driven perspective. Methods: A dataset was constructed using microblogs (n = 125,672) labeled with COVID-19-related super topics (n = 680) from 40,891 users from 1 December 2019 to 17 February 2020. Based on the skeleton and key change points of COVID-19 extracted from microblogging contents, we tracked the public"s emotional evolution modes (accumulated emotions, emotion covariances, and emotion transitions) by time phase and further extracted the details of dominant social events. Results: Public emotions showed different evolution modes during different phases of COVID-19. Events about the development of COVID-19 remained hot, but generally declined, and public attention shifted to other aspects of the epidemic (e.g., encouragement, support, and treatment). Conclusions: These findings suggest that the public"s feedback on COVID-19 predated official accounts on the microblog platform. There were clear differences in the trending events that large users (users with many fans and readings) and common users paid attention to during each phase of COVID-19.