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How did people feel during the Zika virus breakout? A sentiment analysis of Zika virus related posts on Yahoo! Answers
Author(s) -
Zhao Yuehua,
Chen Ye,
Zhang Jin,
Dong Qingxing,
Cao Gaohui,
Zhang Zhaoyang
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.202
Subject(s) - zika virus , outbreak , public health , social media , breakout , psychology , internet privacy , medicine , virus , virology , business , political science , nursing , computer science , law , finance
A sudden outbreak of the Zika virus led to public panic and discussion on social Q&A forums. Most research studies concentrated on what the public discussed about the Zika virus. However, how they felt during the Zika virus outbreak reflects the emotional stability of the public, which has a positive significance in public health monitoring, intervention and service. For this paper, we conducted a sentiment analysis of Zika‐related posts on Yahoo! Answers during the outbreak of the Zika virus to investigate how emotions of the public changed overtime and if users' emotions could be influenced by others. It was found that significantly more negative emotions appeared when an outbreak started in Brazil, yet people's reactions became milder afterwards. Besides, a small positive correlation between the sentiment characteristics of the questions and the received answers implies the exchanges of emotions between questioners and answerers.