posted on 2018-11-02, 09:52authored byOliver Gruebner, Sarah R. Lowe, Martin SykoraMartin Sykora, Ketan Shankardass, S.V. Subramanian, Sandro Galea
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.
History
School
Business and Economics
Department
Business
Published in
Int J Environ Res Public Health
Volume
15
Issue
10
Citation
GRUEBNER, O. ... et al, 2018. 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 (10), 2275.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/
Acceptance date
2018-10-12
Publication date
2018-10-17
Notes
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).