Sentiments and emotions evoked by news headlines of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak

The chronic nature of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and lack of success in treatment and cure is creating an environment that is crucial for mental wellbeing. Presently, we extracted and classified sentiments and emotions from 141,208 headlines of global English news sources regarding the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Humanities & social sciences communications Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 1 - 9
Main Authors: Aslam, Faheem, Awan, Tahir Mumtaz, Syed, Jabir Hussain, Kashif, Aisha, Parveen, Mahwish
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Springer Nature B.V 08.07.2020
Springer Nature
Subjects:
Anger
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Cure
Disease
Economic wellbeing
Emotional well being
Emotions
English language
Negation
Polarity
Sadness
Valence
Well being
ISSN:2662-9992, 2662-9992
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The chronic nature of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and lack of success in treatment and cure is creating an environment that is crucial for mental wellbeing. Presently, we extracted and classified sentiments and emotions from 141,208 headlines of global English news sources regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The headlines considered were those carrying keyword coronavirus between the time frame 15 Janaury, 2020 to 3 June, 2020 from top rated 25 English news sources. The headlines were classified into positive, negative and neutral sentiments after the calculation of text unbounded polarity at the sentence level score and incorporating the valence shifters. In addition, the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Word-Emotion Lexicon was used to calculate the presence of eight emotions at their emotional weight. The results reveal that the news headlines had high emotional scores with a negative polarity. More precisely, around 52% of the news headlines evoked negative sentiments and only 30% evoked positive sentiments while 18% were neutral. Fear, trust, anticipation, sadness, and anger were the main emotions evoked by the news headlines. Overall, the findings of this study can be weaved together into important implications for emotional wellbeing and economic perspective.
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ISSN:2662-9992
2662-9992
DOI:10.1057/s41599-020-0523-3