key: cord-0799020-62k3gl9t
authors: Jones, Rosalind; Mougouei, Davoud; Evans, Simon L.
title: Understanding the emotional response to Covid‐19 information in news and social media: A mental health perspective
date: 2021-10-28
journal: Hum Behav Emerg Technol
DOI: 10.1002/hbe2.304
sha: 810f346484fdeacd6abd131e9ee6faa8bb7c9ab0
doc_id: 799020
cord_uid: 62k3gl9t

The impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic and ensuing social restrictions has been profound, affecting the health, livelihoods, and wellbeing of populations worldwide. Studies have shown widespread effects on mental health, with an increase in stress, loneliness, and depression symptoms related to the pandemic. Media plays a critical role in containing and managing crises, by informing society and fostering positive behavior change. Social restrictions have led to a large increase in reliance on online media channels, and this can influence mental health and wellbeing. Anxiety levels, for instance, may be exacerbated by exposure to Covid‐related content, contagion of negative sentiment among social networks, and “fake news.” In some cases, this may trigger abstinence, leading to isolation and limited access to vital information. To be able to communicate distressing news during crises while protecting the wellbeing of individuals is not trivial; it requires a deeper understanding of people's emotional response to online and social media content. This paper selectively reviews research into consequences of social media usage and online news consumption for wellbeing and mental health, focusing on and discussing their effects in the context of the pandemic. Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, for example, Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis, and Emotion Recognition, are discussed as useful methods for investigating effects on population mental health as the pandemic situation evolves. We present suggestions for future research, and for using these advances to assess large data sets of users' online content, to potentially inform strategies that enhance the mental health of social media users going forward.

The mental health impact of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and the social restrictions imposed in response to it have been profound. Almost all countries and sections of society have been adversely affected. Schools have been closed, families have been divided, healthcare systems have been severely challenged, as have many industries and livelihoods. The ripple effect of the pandemic will continue to be felt for years to come, even if vaccines prove to be effective in halting the spread of the virus. Social restrictions and "lockdowns" might have been essential, but they have triggered isolation, unemployment, and increased levels of stress, anxiety, fear, and loneliness among broad swathes of the global population. The enduring effects of this in terms of longer-term mental health impact are only just starting to emerge and will undoubtedly challenge societies over the coming years. While prevalence of mental health issues was already high in many populations pre-pandemic, incidence of these spiked in 2020. A meta-analysis by Salari et al. (2020) found consistent evidence that the pandemic triggered significantly increased levels of stress, anxiety, and depression across studies and populations, and this might have become more profound as the situation evolved. For example, Shah et al. (2021) found this incidence was considerably higher than that reported in the very initial stages of the pandemic (C. . The authors attribute this increase in prevalence to the social restrictions that were in place in most countries by Spring 2020; they also highlight the potential negative impact of cumulative exposure to Covid-related news and media. A consistent finding across studies is that younger age groups seem to have been more affected in terms of their mental health (Wang, Kala, & Jafar, 2020) . There are various possible reasons for this: socioeconomic uncertainty regarding current and future employment has differentially impacted younger age groups, for example. Another explanatory factor could relate to social media usage and online news consumption, which is highest among young adult age groups. In recent years, social media and online news platforms have revolutionized how we communicate and interact, and how we access information and share it with others, and the Covid-19 pandemic has massively accelerated this trend. Online platforms became even more integral to our lives: in April 2020, 18-24 year olds in the UK spent on average over 5 h a day online; across all adults, time spent online increased by 15% compared to September 2019 (source: Ofcom).

Social media allowed us to communicate and remain socially connected despite social restrictions, and online news provided us with up-to-the-minute access to information in a fast-evolving situation, but their use also presents risks for mental health and wellbeing. This is the focus of the current review.

With usage of these platforms at record levels, it is more important now than ever to develop an understanding of their impact on mental health. Social media has the potential to be a useful tool in combating the mental health toll of the pandemic, but the risks and downsides associated with its use need to be understood and mitigated against. In 2020 mental health support services were halted or disrupted in over 90% of countries (World Health Organisation, 2020) . Although many of these services moved quickly to try and adapt to the social distancing rules, many such services were already under-resourced and now lack the capacity to cope with (Berry et al., 2017) . These benefits provide opportunities not just for those struggling with mental health issues, but also health providers and policy makers. Due to its popularity (70% of young people in the United States use social media multiple times a day; Rideout & Robb, 2018) , social media presents opportunities to rapidly disseminate positive mental health narratives to a broad audience, connect users with prevention groups, and facilitate access to treatment via digital mental health interventions and initiatives (Rice et al., 2016) . Iglesias-Sánchez et al. (2020) analyzed thematic and emotional pandemic-related content posted via Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram: much of this related to strong opinions as well as coping strategies. Sentiments spread dynamically across users, and the authors concluded that social media channels offer the opportunity for "social therapy" by capitalizing on this emotional contagion effect.

This could serve to spread positive emotional reactions among online communities, promote resilience, and disseminate effective coping strategies, in times of crisis. Thus, evidence suggests that social media can benefit social connectedness among isolated individuals and groups, and be a useful source of information and community support for those facing difficulties.

However, not all studies identify positive relationships, and some commentators have raised concerns around potential for harm.

Indeed, emotional contagion across social networks applies to negative, as well as positive emotions (Goldenberg & Gross, 2020) . In 2019, concern around self-harm imagery on social media prompted platforms to actively monitor and remove such content. Some studies have found evidence for links between suicide risk and social media usage in young people, with heavy/addictive social media and internet use increased risk of suicide attempts in many of the studies reviewed by Sedgwick et al. (2019) . However, cyberbullying likely plays a prominent role in this. Also, confounding factors need to be considered, including the sleep disturbance and lack of physical exercise resulting from heavy use of computers and mobile devices (Viner et al., 2019) .

These factors need further scrutiny. Ultimately, strategies to mitigate against these, and also limit exposure to self-harm and suicidal content (e.g., through moderated discussion forums), would allow the benefits of social media for to fully emerge. Ideally, social media should allow beneficial social connections and let individuals share their experiences and access support, within a protected online environment (Biernesser et al., 2020) . those who used social media platforms for more than 2 h a day were about twice more likely to report being socially isolated, compared to those who used for 30 min a day or less. Clearly, engagement with platforms is important: light users probably engage more passively, while heavier users are more engaged and thus more exposed to, and more emotionally impacted by, negative social media experiences such as cyberbullying, disputes, or being "unfriended." Other crosssectional studies have found no association between social media use and depression symptoms (Berryman et al., 2018) , and a very large study based on data from UK and United States (total n = 355,358)

concluded that the association between time spent using digital technology and adolescent wellbeing is negative but very small, accounting for less than 0.4% of variance . found that a 7-day break from social media led to a significant benefit in terms of both self-reported mental wellbeing and social connectedness (Brown & Kuss, 2020) . Thus, overall, despite some evidence that social media can benefit connectedness and wellbeing, the potential for harmful effects is also evident: as noted, of the valence of effects could depend on individual differences within the populations under study, including levels of engagement and personality characteristics.

The potentially harmful effects of social media use during the pandemic have begun to be investigated, underlining that this has played a role in exacerbating levels of stress (First et al., 2021) , anxiety , and poorer wellbeing, for young people in 

In past disasters such as the Boston Marathon Bombings of 2013, studies found evidence of mental health symptoms being directly triggered by exposure to online media content relating to the incident.

Those who viewed graphic images of the attack online were subsequently at higher risk of showing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD) symptoms (Holman et al., 2014 (Holman et al., , 2020 . Longitudinal evidence by Silver et al. (2013) also demonstrated the mental health impact of media exposure following the 9/11 attacks, in a US sample (n = 2189). The study measured PTSD symptoms and health issues via online survey annually for 3 years after the event. Higher exposure to media coverage about 9/11 was associated with increased stress and poor health (Silver et al., 2013) . It could be argued however that such effects might be bidirectional. Indeed, Thompson et al. (2019) provided longitudinal evidence for such a relationship, following a US representative sample (n = 4165) after both the Boston bombings in 2013 and again after the Pulse nightclub attacks of 2016. They found via surveys that the relationship between trauma and media exposure is reciprocal, in that those showing symptoms of trauma after the incidents were more likely to view media coverage of the event, which in turn exacerbated and perpetuated their trauma. These studies provide strong longitudinal evidence of the direct impact media can have in times of distress. However, these studies relied on self-report measures of both media exposure and mental health; work using objective measures would be useful so as to confirm these relationships. Also, it should be noted that these studies focused on exceptional world events that involved graphic and traumatic incidents: findings might not be generalizable to more typical media reports. Nevertheless, these studies are informative regarding the potentially powerful and harmful psychological impact media can have, especially during a time of fear, anxiety and stress. While not a single isolated incident like 9/11, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a wider global impact than perhaps any other phenomenon in recent history, and it has produced a stream of imagery that would have been traumatic for many (e.g., of overwhelmed hospitals). Also, the pandemic has affected all corners of the globe; it therefore feels more immediate and closer at hand to the entire world's population, compared to localized incidents such as 9/11.

Consistent with the findings discussed in the previous section, evidence is emerging that supports a connection between online news media consumption and poorer mental wellbeing during the pandemic. Using self-reported survey responses from a US sample (N = 10,606) in March 2020, Stainback et al. (2020) found that news consumption was associated with higher self-reported psychological distress. They controlled for other relevant variables such as economic impact: participants were questioned about whether they or someone they knew had lost a job because of the pandemic. Those who followed the news "very closely" reported nearly 25% higher distress levels compared to those who followed the news less closely (Stainback et al., 2020) . Being a cross-sectional study, the direction of causality here is not clear: higher distress individuals could simply be watching more news, but bidirectional effects seem likely. It seems fitting that the word "doomscrolling" was added as a word of note in the Oxford Dictionary in 2020, meaning: "obsessively checking online news for updates, especially on social media feeds, with the expectation that the news will be bad, such that the feeling of dread from this negative expectation fuels a compulsion to continue looking for March and April 2020 found a significant correlation between symptoms and time spent seeking out Covid-related information and news (Bendau et al., 2021) ; thus effects might be at least partially attributable to the personality characteristics/personal circumstances that drive some individuals to seek out Covid-related information, rather than media presentation of it per se. For example, some recent work has shown that individual differences in trust attitudes has contributed to wellbeing levels during the pandemic: Lee (2020) showed that higher self-reported trust levels towards national institutions (including the media) was linked to better coping and higher wellbeing. More detailed work is needed to unpick these relationships and the directions of causality and determine how individual differences in personality characteristics and mental health status impacts the relationship between online news consumption and users' mental health.

As described above, the impact of social media use and online news consumption on mental health has been fairly extensively studied but the majority of investigations have relied on cross-sectional selfreport data to detect associations. This precludes inferences regarding causality, and self-report survey data has limitations including social desirability and sampling bias, but does allow associations with specific variables of interest to be tested. However, larger sample sizes would be helpful to infer effects across populations.

An alternative approach is to simply consider the content being generated by users, and draw inferences from the emotions expressed within it. One method for doing this is sentiment analysis and emotion recognition, forms of natural language processing. Rather than recruiting participants to engage with self-report survey studies, this approach involves analyzing very large datasets of user comments using automated means, to extract patterns and trends in emotions expressed. Sentiment analysis measures the polarity of the text, by coding language to produce a ratio of how negative or positive emotion levels are. Emotion recognition takes this a step further to identify specific emotions, such as those found on the wheel of emotions (Plutchik, 1962 (Plutchik, , 1980 . These emotions include eight basic emotions of anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust.

Another useful element of NLP is a task called thematic analysis or topic classification. This works to classify text into a set of preselected topics or themes. By classifying the data into themes or topics, more Other drawbacks of this approach include contamination of the data by bot accounts and false identities.

Research using natural language processing has provided insight into how users have reacted and been affected by the pandemic; see Table 1 for an overview of these studies. Various published studies used these tools to investigate the general reactions to the pandemic based on Twitter posts, during the earlier stages of the pandemic (Abd-Alrazaq et al., 2020; Boon-Itt & Skunkan, 2020; Chandrasekaran et al., 2020; Chang et al., 2020; Das & Dutta, 2020; de las Heras-Pedrosa et al., 2020; Hung et al., 2020; Q Liu et al., 2020; Medford et al., 2020; Sesagiri Raamkumar et al., 2020; Tan et al., 2020; Xue et al., 2020; . Unsurprisingly, these studies generally 

Regarding mental health implications, some work is emerging using these tools to study the psychological impact of the pandemic on Twitter users (Crocamo et al., 2021; Valdez et al., 2020) (2020) analyzed Twitter data to estimate levels of stress in major US cities alongside the number of local Covid cases, finding a correlation between these. Stress was estimated using an algorithm incorporating the lexicon from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to produce an algorithm that recognized stress-relevant words from the PHQ-9. The authors also identified certain topics in the news, such as political announcements, as being directly linked to an increase in PHQ levels, concluding that online news media content and exposure to has a direct influence on stress levels among users. With media outlets competing for our attention, sensationalism has become commonplace: this study provides evidence that anxiety-inducing local events and their reporting by online media outlets have a direct impact on wellbeing. Aslam et al. (2020) compared 141,208 news headlines between December 2019 and June 2020, across 25 global news organizations. By using sentiment analysis, it was found that during this time period 52% of headlines containing the word Covid were negative in terms of emotional polarity: only 30% were likely to evoke positive sentiments while a mere 18% were neutral. Whether this balance has shifted since vaccines became available and restrictions partially lifted in many countries is currently unknown, but the finding does highlight the highly emotionally charged and predominantly negative content of online news headlines in the earlier stages of the pandemic. This will have undoubtedly influenced the prevailing emotional responses of users, discussed previously.

The online world can provide insight into the lives and minds of the global population on a mass scale. As we have discussed, social media and online news channels have become even more central to people's lives due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and evidence points to considerable impact of online news consumption and social media usage on mental health and wellbeing. While much work exists cross-sectionally, using online surveys to understand subjective mental health in relation to news and social media usage, more can be done to fully understand the underlying factors. The relationships are not clear-cut, and vary according to individual factors and usage characteristics. On the one hand, while social media has considerable potential to support wellbeing and alleviate loneliness, high social media use and news consumption can also cause stress, anxiety, and perpetuate trauma. In some studies, abstinence from social media was linked to better wellbeing; likewise, excessive online news consumption can negatively impact mental health. However, the direction of causality, and potential mediating factors, require more in-depth study. In the context of Covid-19, research has emphasized how the online world might have fostered stress and anxiety through stress-inducing news and social media content. The pandemic has engrained and intensified the impact of social media and online news consumption, with reliance on online interactions and news sources increasing due to social restrictions. Therefore, it is more important than ever to study how heavy use of social media and online news impacts on users.

Natural language processing techniques represent excellent tools to characterise levels of emotions expressed amongst users, and understand how these are affected by news content. These tools facilitate large-scale investigations into the impact of online media consumption on users' psychological wellbeing. They provide us with a way of objectively measuring emotion levels and polarity to identify patterns in populations over time, to help us understand emotional responses to events. Future research could focus on specific user groups and populations, both to identify at-risk groups and also inform intervention strategies, allowing us to leverage the significant potential of online platforms to support wellbeing and mental health.

This research was supported by grants from the University Global Partnership Network (UGPN; https://ugpn.org/), and The Regional

Collaborations Programme COVID-19 Digital Grants (Australian Academy of Science), awarded to DM and SE.

The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons. com/publon/10.1002/hbe2.304.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study. 

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