The Emotional Impact of COVID-19 News Reporting: A Longitudinal Study Using Natural Language Processing
Simon EvansRosalind JonesErkan AlkanJaime Simão SichmanAmanul HaqueFrancisco Bráulio OliveiraDavoud Mougouei
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The emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing social restrictions has been profound, with widespread negative effects on mental health. We made use of the natural language processing and large-scale Twitter data to explore this in depth, identifying emotions in COVID-19 news content and user reactions to it, and how these evolved over the course of the pandemic. We focused on major UK news channels, constructing a dataset of COVID-related news tweets (tweets from news organisations) and user comments made in response to these, covering Jan 2020 to April 2021. Natural language processing was used to analyse topics and levels of anger, joy, optimism, and sadness. Overall, sadness was the most prevalent emotion in the news tweets, but this was seen to decline over the timeframe under study. In contrast, amongst user tweets, anger was the overall most prevalent emotion. Time epochs were defined according to the time course of the UK social restrictions, and some interesting effects emerged regarding these. Further, correlation analysis revealed significant positive correlations between the emotions in the news tweets and the emotions expressed amongst the user tweets made in response, across all channels studied. Results provide unique insight onto how the dominant emotions present in UK news and user tweets evolved as the pandemic unfolded. Correspondence between news and user tweet emotional content highlights the potential emotional effect of online news on users and points to strategies to combat the negative mental health impact of the pandemic.Keywords:
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The article examines emotion sensitivity in policemen and its relationships with emotion suppression. It was hypothesized that individuals with high emotion suppression were less efficient in recognizing others’ negative emotions. Forty-nine policemen from the Arkhangelsk region of Russia aged from 22 to 50 took part in the study. Emotion sensitivity was measured presenting faces with dynamic changes in emotional expression from neutral to the one of four emotion categories, namely happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Emotion suppression was measured with Gross’ Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Happiness was recognized faster and more accurately compared to negative emotions. Among negative emotions, the least intensity was needed for the recognition of fear, more intensity for the recognition of sadness, and even more for anger. Fear was recognized more accurately compared to anger; there was no difference in the accuracy of the recognition of fear and sadness. Individuals high in expressive suppression recognized happiness faster and mistook sadness for anger more often. The results are discussed in the context of the specific features of policemen professional activity.
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The aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of reappraisal, acceptance, and rumination for regulating anger and sadness on decision-making. Participants (N = 165) were asked to recall two autobiographical events in which they felt intense anger and sadness, respectively. Participants were then instructed to reappraise, accept, ruminate, or not use any strategies to regulate their feelings of anger and sadness. Following this manipulation, risk aversion, and decision-making strategies were measured using a computer-based measure of risk-taking and a simulated real-life decision-making task. Participants who were instructed to reappraise their emotions showed the least anger and sadness, the most adaptive decision-making strategies, but the least risk aversion as compared to the participants in the other conditions. These findings suggest that emotion regulation strategies of negative affective states have an immediate effect on decision-making and risk-taking behaviors.
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The authors conducted 2 studies to identify the vocal acoustical correlates of unresolved anger and sadness among women reporting unresolved anger toward an attachment figure. In Study 1, participants (N = 17) were induced to experience and express anger then sadness or sadness then anger. In Study 2, a 2nd group of participants (N = 22) underwent a relationship-oriented, emotion-focused analogue therapy session. Results from both studies showed that, relative to emotionally neutral speech, anger evoked an increase in articulation rate and in mean fundamental frequency (F0) and F0-range, whereas sadness evoked an increase in F0-perturbation. Both F0 and F0-range were larger for anger than for sadness. In addition, results from the mood-induction-procedure study revealed 2 Emotion×Order interactions. Whereas variations in amplitude range suggested that anger evoked less physiological activation when induced after sadness, variations in F0-perturbation suggested that sadness evoked more physiological activation when induced after anger. These findings illustrate the feasibility of using acoustical measures to identify clients' personally and clinically meaningful emotional experiences, and shifts between such emotional experiences, in the context of psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).
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The master's thesis researches the areas of expressing and regulating the emotions of anger, fear and sadness in teachers in an adapted education program with a lower educational standard. First, it focuses on the definition and meaning of emotions and on the characteristics of emotions and their classification. It describes the most common explanations of emotions. It then focuses on the emotions of anger, fear and sadness, and on their characteristics. It describes emotional awareness, and the expression and regulation of emotions, with an emphasis on emotion regulation strategies and their effectiveness. As the research studied the emotions of teachers in an adapted education program with a lower educational standard, the thesis describes this program and the students involved in it, as well as the previous research in the field of teachers' emotions. The purpose of the research was to analyze situations that arouse emotions of anger, fear and sadness in teachers and to determine how and with what strategies they regulate their emotions while working in the classroom, and what the characteristics of the strategies used to regulate these three emotions are. The research involved 30 teachers who teach in an adapted education program with a lower educational standard. The results showed that teachers experience emotions of anger, fear and sadness in different situations, but that most often they experience anger due to students' behavioral problems, fear due to the possibility of students' injuries, and sadness due to the students' difficult social and family conditions. While emotions of sadness, fear and anger can be expressed verbally and non-verbally, they are sometimes suppressed or not expressed at all. Teachers use various strategies for regulating emotions, such as situation modification, reappraisal, reshaping the physiological response, and reshaping behavior by seeking social support and suppression. Emotion regulation strategies vary in frequency of use depending on the emotion teachers experience. In regulating the emotion of anger, teachers most often mentioned the following strategies: situation modification, reappraisal, and reshaping the physiological response; in regulating the emotion of fear, teachers most often opted for combinations of different strategies, while in regulating the emotion of sadness they usually went with reappraisal. There are differences between individual emotions according to the use of individual strategies for regulating them and their short-term and long-term effectiveness, as well as the automaticity of choosing an individual strategy. According to teachers, suppression, for example, proved to be effective both in the long term and short term in managing anger, while the teachers rated it as the least effective in the short-term management of sadness. The results of the research show that in the future it would make sense to identify strategies for regulating individual emotions and not all emotions at the same time.
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We used a Face-in-the-Crowd task to examine whether hostile environments predict enhanced detection of anger, and whether such enhanced cognition occurs for a different negative emotion, sadness, as well. We conducted a well-powered, preregistered study in 100 college students and 100 individuals from a community sample with greater exposure to hostile environments. At the group level, the community sample was less accurate at detecting both angry and sad faces than students; and, only students discriminated anger more accurately than sadness. At the individual level, having experienced more violence did not predict enhanced anger detection accuracy. In general, participants had a lower threshold (i.e., a more liberal criterion) for detecting emotion in response to anger than sadness. And, students had a higher threshold (i.e., a more conservative criterion) for detecting emotion than the community sample in response to both anger and sadness. Overall, these findings contradict our hypothesis that exposure to hostile environments predicts enhanced danger detection. Rather, our community sample was more prone to over-perceiving emotions, consistent with previous studies showing bias in threat-exposed populations. Future work is needed to tease apart the conditions in which people exposed to social danger show enhanced accuracy or bias in their perception of emotions.
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Objective To study the cognitive tendencies in recognizing negative emotional faces.Methods The experiment used the traditional flanker paradigm for reference.Forty-eight university students (19 males,29 females) finished the flanker tasks deigned by E-Prime, and their accuracy rate and reaction time were recorded in the study.Results ANOVA revealed that,in all cases,the accuracy rate of anger was significant higher than fear and sadness (96.60% ,94.50% ,94.40% ) (P＜0.05).And when the flanking stimuli were fear faces or there were no flanking stimuli, the reaction time of anger was much shorter than fear and sadness ( respectively,fear(801.27 ± 140.99) ms,anger(723.94 ± 151.37 ) ms, sadness(812.21 ± 148.85 ) ms; fear(788.17 ±148.81 ) ms, anger ( 694.28 ± 111.99 ) ms, sadness (763.57 ± 133.91 ) ms, P ＜ 0.05 ).When the flanking stimuli were anger or sadness faces, the reaction time of anger was significant shorter than fear( respectively, fear( 824.09 ± 164.42) ms, anger (721.48 ± 124.06 ) ms, sadness ( 760.50 ± 131.12 ) ms; fear ( 798.95 ± 146.40) ms, anger (702.55 ± 136.07 ) ms, sadness (750.48 ± 133.86) ms, P ＜ 0.05).Conclusion There are no flanker effects in recognizing different negative emotional faces, but there are anger superiority effects of face recognition and cognitive tendencies, which is helpful for clinical diagnosis and treatment of some diseases associated with emotional disorders.
Key words:
Facial recognition; Fear; Anger; Sadness; Cognitive tendencies
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To conduct a cross-cultural test of a theory specifying the appraisals that elicit particular emotions, undergraduates from India and the United States were asked how they appraised events that caused them to feel sadness, fear, or anger. In both cultures there was evidence that an appraisal of powerlessness characterized incidents leading to sadness and fear, rather than anger; and an appraisal that other persons caused negative events characterized incidents leading to anger, rather than sadness or fear. Also, Indians appraised events as less discrepant from what they had wanted than Americans did; this accounted for lower sadness and anger among Indians. Overall, cultural differences in appraisal explained cultural differences in emotion, due to underlying cross-cultural similarities in appraisal-emotion relationships.
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This paper focuses on how anger and sadness are self-perceived differently in males or females under the same situation. The importance of the current study is to examine the two most important negative emotions among women and men which are sadness and anger. In this study, one sad video and one infuriating video will be used as emotional triggers to evoke participants' emotions. After watching the videos, participants will be asked to rate five abstract images corresponding to one question about each emotion: sadness, fear, happiness, tranquility, and anger. We will only analyze the rating of sadness and anger, all other four questions of emotion are only to mask our real purpose. The result of this study will show that males tend to experience more anger than females do under infuriating situations, while females tend to experience more sadness than males do under sad situations.
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