TY - JOUR
T1 - Emotions on Twitter as crisis imprint in high-trust societies
T2 - Do ambient affiliations affect emotional expression during the pandemic?
AU - Charquero-Ballester, Marina
AU - Walter, Jessica Gabriele
AU - Rybner, Astrid Sletten
AU - Nissen, Ida Anthonj
AU - Enevoldsen, Kenneth Christian
AU - Bechmann, Anja
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2024 Charquero-Ballester et al.
PY - 2024/3
Y1 - 2024/3
N2 - During the Covid-19 crisis, citizens turned to Twitter for information seeking, emotional outlet and sense-making of the crisis, creating ad hoc social communities using crisis-specific hashtags. The theory of ambient affiliation posits that the use of hashtags upscales the call to affiliate with the values expressed in the tweet. Given the deep functional tie between values and emotions, hashtag use might further amplify certain emotions. While emotions in crises-hashtagged communities have been previously investigated, the hypothesis of amplification of emotions through hashtag use has not yet been tested. We investigate such effect during the Covid-19 crisis in a scenario of high-trust Nordic societies, focusing on non-hashtagged, crisis hashtagged (e.g., ‘#Covid-19’) and threat hashtagged (e.g., ‘#misinformation’) tweets. To do so we apply XLM-RoBERTa to estimate Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust, Joy and Optimism. Our results revealed that crisis-hashtagged (#Covid-19) tweets expressed more negative emotions (Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness) and less positive emotions (Optimism and Joy) than non-hashtagged Covid-19 tweets for all countries except Finland. Threat tweets (#misinformation) expressed even more negative emotions (Anger, Fear, Disgust) and less positive emotions (Optimism and Joy) than #Covid-19 tweets, with a particularly large effect for Anger. Our findings provide useful context for previous research on collective emotions during crises, as most Twitter content is not hashtagged, and given the faster spread of emotionally charged content, further support the special focus on specific ad hoc communities for crisis and threat management and monitoring.
AB - During the Covid-19 crisis, citizens turned to Twitter for information seeking, emotional outlet and sense-making of the crisis, creating ad hoc social communities using crisis-specific hashtags. The theory of ambient affiliation posits that the use of hashtags upscales the call to affiliate with the values expressed in the tweet. Given the deep functional tie between values and emotions, hashtag use might further amplify certain emotions. While emotions in crises-hashtagged communities have been previously investigated, the hypothesis of amplification of emotions through hashtag use has not yet been tested. We investigate such effect during the Covid-19 crisis in a scenario of high-trust Nordic societies, focusing on non-hashtagged, crisis hashtagged (e.g., ‘#Covid-19’) and threat hashtagged (e.g., ‘#misinformation’) tweets. To do so we apply XLM-RoBERTa to estimate Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust, Joy and Optimism. Our results revealed that crisis-hashtagged (#Covid-19) tweets expressed more negative emotions (Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness) and less positive emotions (Optimism and Joy) than non-hashtagged Covid-19 tweets for all countries except Finland. Threat tweets (#misinformation) expressed even more negative emotions (Anger, Fear, Disgust) and less positive emotions (Optimism and Joy) than #Covid-19 tweets, with a particularly large effect for Anger. Our findings provide useful context for previous research on collective emotions during crises, as most Twitter content is not hashtagged, and given the faster spread of emotionally charged content, further support the special focus on specific ad hoc communities for crisis and threat management and monitoring.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85186915963&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0296801
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0296801
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 38442085
AN - SCOPUS:85186915963
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 19
JO - PLOS ONE
JF - PLOS ONE
IS - 3
M1 - e0296801
ER -