%0 Journal Article
%@ 2561-326X
%I JMIR Publications
%V 5
%N 9
%P e27741
%T Emotional Analysis of Twitter Posts During the First Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Greece: Infoveillance Study
%A Geronikolou,Styliani
%A Drosatos,George
%A Chrousos,George
%+ Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens, Soranou Ephessiou 4, Athens, 11527, Greece, 30 2106597403, sgeronik@gmail.com
%K emotional analysis
%K COVID-19
%K Twitter
%K Greece
%K infodemics
%K emotional contagion
%K epidemiology
%K pandemic
%K mental health
%D 2021
%7 29.9.2021
%9 Original Paper
%J JMIR Form Res
%G English
%X Background: The effectiveness of public health measures depends upon a community’s compliance as well as on its positive or negative emotions. Objective: The purpose of this study was to perform an analysis of the expressed emotions in English tweets by Greek Twitter users during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Greece. Methods: The period of this study was from January 25, 2020 to June 30, 2020. Data collection was performed by using appropriate search words with the filter-streaming application programming interface of Twitter. The emotional analysis of the tweets that satisfied the inclusion criteria was achieved using a deep learning approach that performs better by utilizing recurrent neural networks on sequences of characters. Emotional epidemiology tools such as the 6 basic emotions, that is, joy, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger based on the Paul Ekman classification were adopted. Results: The most frequent emotion that was detected in the tweets was “surprise” at the emerging contagion, while the imposed isolation resulted mostly in “anger” (odds ratio 2.108, 95% CI 0.986-4.506). Although the Greeks felt rather safe during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, their positive and negative emotions reflected a masked “flight or fight” or “fear versus anger” response to the contagion. Conclusions: The findings of our study show that emotional analysis emerges as a valid tool for epidemiology evaluations, design, and public health strategy and surveillance. 
%M 34469328
%R 10.2196/27741
%U https://formative.jmir.org/2021/9/e27741
%U https://doi.org/10.2196/27741
%U http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34469328