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Researchers from MIT found that the COVID-War had a major impact on the emotional state of individuals—regardless of what country they live in—by comparing negative social media posts on Mondays during normal times and posts during the onset of the outbreak.
These researchers found that negative posts in the early stages of the outbreak were 4.7 times as widespread as the average Monday, which is seen as the most depressing day of the week during normal times.
“The takeaway here is that the pandemic itself caused a huge emotional toll, four to five times the variation in sentiment observed in a normal week,” Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results, said.
Researchers at the university used artificial intelligence to study the social media posts from hundreds of millions of people from about 100 countries.
StudyFinds.org reported that the research took into account 654 million messages on Twitter and Weibo. The AI calculated the language that was used within the post. The timeframe of the posts was from 1 January 2020 to 31 May 2020.
“The pandemic shock is even larger than the days when there is a hurricane in a region,” another co-author said.
TREND FORECAST: This report is old news to Trends Journal subscribers. We have reported extensively on the mental-health implications that the outbreak had on society. (See “COVID LOCKDOWN: MENTAL ILLNESS BLUES,” “LOCKDOWN MADNESS: CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE,” “THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN A TIME OF MORAL AND SPIRITUAL BLACKOUT” and “AI MENTAL HEALTH ‘INTERVENTIONS’ ABOUT TO GET REAL.”)