During the COVID-19 pandemic, social lives moved online to a larger extent than ever before, as opportunities for face-to-face social contact in daily life were limited. While we posted news and posts on social media, there are opportunities to be recorded and researched by others.
The research in the World Happiness Report 2022 analyses how emotional trends in society at-large can be measured using text data from social media. In general, the correlation of social media and survey emotions seems particularly high for the negative emotions of sadness and anxiety.
Both social media and survey measures of sadness and anxiety clearly increased during the first COVID-19 outbreak for a relatively long time period. Anxiety seems not only related to cases, but also to the increase in the stringency of measures.However, posts with elements of happiness have seen a sharp drop during the outbreak.It can be seen that the epidemic has an impact on people's physical and mental health.