Spain, among the countries with a worse state of mind at the beginning of the pandemic


A study has analyzed the behavior of people on social networks in more than 100 countries

The pandemic influenced the mood around the world and an analysis of messages on social networks indicates that the most affected They were Australia, Spain, United Kingdom and Colombiawhile Bahrain, Botswana, Greece and Tunisia were the ones that took it the best.

A study led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States) analyzed 654 million messages on Twitter and Weibo sent by 10.5 million people in more than 100 countries between January and May 2020, at the start of the pandemic.

The analysis published by Nature Human Behavior measured the degree of affectation of feelings, for which they developed a daily “sentiment index” using machine learning. This was used to track how people express their emotions in social networks during the beginning of the first wave.

Fall with the arrival of covid

The research, which analyzed the linguistic terms used in social networks, pointed out “a sharp drop in positive public sentiment” At the beginning of 2020with a subsequent gradual return to the pre-pandemic situation, as explained by MIT.

Covid outbreaks caused a rapid decline in sentiment in all the countries studied, with the largest ones occurring in Australia, Spain, the UK and Colombia.

On average, there was a slower recovery of positive emotions expressed – defined as the number of days it takes for a country’s sentiment to recover to half its normal state – which ranged from 1.2 days in Israel to 29 in Turkey.

Under normal circumstances, people tend to express the most optimistic emotions on social media on weekends, and the most negative on Mondays.

Around the world, the start of the pandemic induced a negative turn in sentiment 4.7 times greater than the traditional gap between the weekend and Monday. So the first few months “were like a very, very bad Monday, in aggregate, globally, for social media users.”

Emotional charge

“The pandemic itself caused a enormous emotional burdenfour to five times the variation in sentiment seen in a typical week,” said Siqi Zheng of MIT.

The researchers used software natural language processing to assess social media content and examined the language of messages from the pandemic period relative to historical norms.

Having previously studied the effects of pollution, extreme weather and natural disasters on public sentiment, they found that covid produced greater changes in mood than those other circumstances.

The investigation also revealed a potentially surprising fact about the policies of lockdownand it is that these do not seem to have much effect on the mood of the public.

“Lockdowns cannot be expected to have the same effect in all countries and the distribution of responses is quite wide,” said Yichun Fan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Confinement, more security?

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However, the analysis of the messages did not reveal the “overwhelmingly negative impact on people that might be expected”, but that there was even “an small positive reaction“, In all countries.

“On the one hand, lockdown policies can make people feel safe and not so scared. On the other hand, when social activities cannot be carried out, the blockage supposes another emotional stress. The impact of the lockdown policies may go both ways,” Zheng said.


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