TY  - JOUR
AU  - Geronikolou, Styliani
AU  - Drosatos, George
AU  - Chrousos, George
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/9/29
TI  - Emotional Analysis of Twitter Posts During the First Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Greece: Infoveillance Study
JO  - JMIR Form Res
SP  - e27741
VL  - 5
IS  - 9
KW  - emotional analysis
KW  - COVID-19
KW  - Twitter
KW  - Greece
KW  - infodemics
KW  - emotional contagion
KW  - epidemiology
KW  - pandemic
KW  - mental health
AB  - 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. 
SN  - 2561-326X
UR  - https://formative.jmir.org/2021/9/e27741
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/27741
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34469328
DO  - 10.2196/27741
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/27741
ER  -