Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-17-2018
Journal / Book Title
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Abstract
Disasters have substantial consequences for population mental health. We used Twitter to (1) extract negative emotions indicating discomfort in New York City (NYC) before, during, and after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. We further aimed to (2) identify whether pre- or peri-disaster discomfort were associated with peri- or post-disaster discomfort, respectively, and to (3) assess geographic variation in discomfort across NYC census tracts over time. Our sample consisted of 1,018,140 geo-located tweets that were analyzed with an advanced sentiment analysis called ”Extracting the Meaning Of Terse Information in a Visualization of Emotion” (EMOTIVE). We calculated discomfort rates for 2137 NYC census tracts, applied spatial regimes regression to find associations of discomfort, and used Moran’s I for spatial cluster detection across NYC boroughs over time. We found increased discomfort, that is, bundled negative emotions after the storm as compared to during the storm. Furthermore, pre- and peri-disaster discomfort was positively associated with post-disaster discomfort; however, this association was different across boroughs, with significant associations only in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens. In addition, rates were most prominently spatially clustered in Staten Island lasting pre- to post-disaster. This is the first study that determined significant associations of negative emotional responses found in social media posts over space and time in the context of a natural disaster, which may guide us in identifying those areas and populations mostly in need for care.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15102275
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Gruebner, Oliver; Lowe, Sarah R.; Sykora, Martin; Shankardass, Ketan; Subramanian, SV; and Galea, Sandro, "Spatio-Temporal Distribution of Negative Emotions in New York City After a Natural Disaster as Seen in Social Media" (2018). Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 609.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/psychology-facpubs/609
Published Citation
Gruebner, Oliver, Sarah R. Lowe, Martin Sykora, Ketan Shankardass, S. V. Subramanian, and Sandro Galea. "Spatio-temporal distribution of negative emotions in New York City after a natural disaster as seen in social media." International journal of environmental research and public health 15, no. 10 (2018): 2275.
Included in
Applied Behavior Analysis Commons, Clinical Psychology Commons, Community Psychology Commons, Comparative Psychology Commons, Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons, Health Information Technology Commons, Health Psychology Commons, Human Factors Psychology Commons, Industrial and Organizational Psychology Commons, Personality and Social Contexts Commons, Psychiatry and Psychology Commons, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Commons, Public Health Commons, Social Psychology Commons, Theory and Philosophy Commons