Methods
- We analysed 1 billion tweets from users located in the UK by Crimson Hexagon. Only original tweets (no retweets) in English and from users with a number of followers between 100 and 10.000 (to remove spam and media) were included.
- To analyse anxiety, tweet text was matched for anxiety terms from the LIWC lexicon. LIWC is a standard methodology in psychology for text analysis that includes validated lexica in English.
- Similarly, tweet text was matched to a list of prosocial terms used in previous research, including for example words that describe ways of helping, supporting, cooperating, sharing, volunteering, or donating. We excluded words referring to health and healing (e.g. hospitalize), as wall as the word sharing, to avoid confounds with non-prosocial tweets about Covid-19 and health or about sharing of links/tweets/videos, etc, respectively.
- Marked dates during the Covid-19 outbreak are taken from Wikipedia.
Anxiety
In both figures below, the lines indicate the following events:
- Red:
- Terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 2019-03-15
- Terrorist attack in London killing two people on 2019-11-30
- Blue: The UK General Election on 2019-12-12
- Yellow: Christmas and New Years eve
- Green: First Covid-19 case on 2020-01-31
- Orange: First death from Covid-19 on 2020-03-13
- Turquois: Johnson recommends (voluntary) social distancing measures
Observations for anxiety
- Anxiety, worries and stress are usually expressed in about 4.1% of tweets.
- The events around Covid-19 led to the highest values so far, with 7% of tweets containing anxiety related words.
- This corresponds to an increase of 67% compared to an average day in 2019.
Prosocial behavior since the outbreak of Covid-19
In most countries in which expressions of anxiety have risen since the outbreak of Covid-19, expressions of empathy, willingness to support each other and cooperate (in short, prosocial behavior) have increased as well. The increase begins at different moments in different countries, probably depending on which information people had about Covid-19 in other countries, and on which measures were communicated in what way by their governments.
In the plot below, the lines indicate the following events:
- Green: First Covid-19 case on 2020-01-31
- Grey: 27 February 2020: Since the outbreak of Covid-19, the day on which levels of prosociality in tweets increase above the average level from 2019 and remain high for several days in a row.
- Orange: First death from Covid-19 on 2020-03-13
- Turquois: Johnson recommends (voluntary) social distancing measures
Observations for prosocial behavior
- Since the first death, which occured shortly before social Boris Johson recommended to practice social distancing, expressions of willingness to help have risen sharply by 15% compared to the baseline in 2019.
- They have remained at relatively high levels since then.
Conclusions
- After the first cases of Covid-19, anxiety peaks, but then returns back to to a typical level and remains relatively low for 10 days.
- From March 10 onwards, the level of anxiety expressed in tweets almost doubles, as the events around the outbreak of Covid-19 start to concern people more personally, peaking at the highest level observed during the period analysed. They have remained at a very high level for the 2 last weeks.
- Expressions of empathy, willingness to help and support others start increasing a bit after anxiety, shortly before Boris Johson recommends social distancing for the first time. Although they do not increase as much as anxiety levels, they have reached the highest levels observed in the analysed time period (since January 2019)
- Our results seem to suggest that people aren’t only more afraid, but also more willing to support others who need it.
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