Topical Analysis of Depressive Mood Changes in Youth during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the mood changes of youth groups during the social closure control of the COVID-19 pan-demic and the primary causes of those changes, taking Chinese online video platforms as an example. We also compare the main concerns of various periods to provide feasible references and suggestions on psychological interventions for young people during the social closure control period. In this study, we identified mood changes during the COVID-19 pandemic with 31,213 comments on the news videos of the Bilibili video platform through four stages data collection, data processing, LDA topic modeling, and mood identification. Through a comparative analysis, we investigated the topical features of young people's mood changes in three COVID-19 periods pre-, mid-, and late-epidemic. As a result, we found that social isolation measures such as closure and homeschooling with long-term Internet use during the epidemic were more likely to cause depression in young people. © 2023 IEEE.