Facing COVID-19 in China and the US: Do we have the same emotions?

ABSTRACT

COVID-19, a global pandemic, has provided a unique background for examining the commonalities and differences in the rules of public mood change under different cultures. This study used China and the United States as the representative countries of tight and loose cultures, respectively. We constructed an attention index of the pandemic and five emotion indexes of China and the US, respectively, to examine the commonness of human emotional responses to crises and the gradual change law among different types of emotions, and the influence of tight-loose cultures on various kinds of public emotions. The trend data of Baidu Index and Google Trends was collected for a three-step analysis. First, the time series chart of the attention index and public emotion index of the COVID-19 pandemic in the two countries were compared;Second, the Granger causality test was used to analyze the relationship among different types of emotions. Finally, the differences in the proportion of various emotional indexes during the outbreak period between China and the US were compared using the t-test. The results showed that in both countries, fear was the dominant emotion at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was gradually taken over by depression and sadness. We also found that fear and anger can be used to predict sadness and depression in the middle and long term. Moreover, our data showed that the proportion of anger and fear in China was significantly higher than that in the US, while the proportion of sadness in China was significantly lower. The positive emotion index was significantly higher in China than in the US. The results can relatively verify the response to stress at the group level and the psychological characteristics of tight-loose cultures, which to some extent can be used as a general reference for crisis psychological assistance under different cultures. © 2021 IEEE