The Emotional Impact of COVID-19 News Reporting: A Longitudinal Study Using Natural Language Processing

The emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing social restrictions has been profound, with widespread negative effects on mental health. We made use of the natural language processing and large-scale Twitter data to explore this in depth, identifying emotions in COVID-19 news content and user reactions to it, and how these evolved over the course of the pandemic. We focused on major UK news channels, constructing a dataset of COVID-related news tweets (tweets from news organisations) and user comments made in response to these, covering Jan 2020 to April 2021. Natural language processing was used to analyse topics and levels of anger, joy, optimism, and sadness. Overall, sadness was the most prevalent emotion in the news tweets, but this was seen to decline over the timeframe under study. In contrast, amongst user tweets, anger was the overall most prevalent emotion. Time epochs were defined according to the time course of the UK social restrictions, and some interesting effects emerged regarding these. Further, correlation analysis revealed significant positive correlations between the emotions in the news tweets and the emotions expressed amongst the user tweets made in response, across all channels studied. Results provide unique insight onto how the dominant emotions present in UK news and user tweets evolved as the pandemic unfolded. Correspondence between news and user tweet emotional content highlights the potential emotional effect of online news on users and points to strategies to combat the negative mental health impact of the pandemic.