JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

COVID-19 pandemic is a traumatic collective chronic experience, with tremendous consequences on mental and psychological health that can be reflected also in people's use of words. Psycholinguistic analysis of tweets from Twitter allows obtaining information about emotional expression, thinking patterns, and somatosensory experience of people, which are particularly important in traumatic events contexts.

Objective:

to analyze the influence of official Italian COVID-19 daily data (new cases, deaths, and hospital discharges), and the phase of managing the pandemic on how people express emotions, their thinking patterns and somatosensory experiences in Italian tweets written during first phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy.

Methods:

1,697,490 Italian COVID-19-related tweets written from 14th February 15th June were retrieved and analyzed with LIWC2015, to calculate three summary psycholinguistic variables: emotional tone, analytical thinking, and somatosensory processes. Official daily data about new COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospital discharges were retrieved from the Italian Prime Minister's Office and Civil Protection Department GitHub page. Three phases of managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy were considered. We performed three general models, one for each summary variable as dependent variable and with daily data and phase of managing pandemic as independent variables.

Results:

General linear models to assess differences in daily scores of analytical thinking, emotional tone and somatosensory processes were significant, respectively [F(5, 105)= 9.08, P < .001, = .30] , [F(6, 104)= 22.30, P < .001, = .56], [F(6, 104)= 5.84, P < .001, = .25].

Conclusions:

COVID-19 pandemic affects how people express emotions, thinking patterns and somatosensory experiences in tweets. Our study contributed to the investigation of pandemic psychological consequences through psycholinguistic analysis of social media textual data.