From excess mortality to GDP contraction, there are many ways of understanding the effect of the pandemic. Now scientists have given us another: in terms of happiness, the pandemic was four times as bad as a Monday morning.
An analysis of the language used on social media has found that globally, the arrival of the coronavirus caused a lot of unhappiness. While few would be surprised that a killer pandemic brought the mood down, the research was able to quantify it — showing that the drop was several times that which greets the end of each weekend, and greater than that caused by a medium-sized hurricane.
The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, used “sentiment analysis” automatically to scan the contents of 600 million social media posts from 10.5 million people, and assess the emotional content. This produced a standardised score of how happy or unhappy a population was.
“The takeaway here is that the pandemic itself caused a huge emotional toll, four to five times the variation in sentiment observed in a normal week,” Professor Siqi Zheng, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said.
Because the posts all had a location, the researchers could see how changes in happiness differed between countries. Britain experienced one of the largest drops in happiness in Europe, beaten only by Spain.
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In general they found that in countries with a higher death toll and less efficient governments, people were more unhappy and took longer to recover. But most places suffered. Across the world, the magnitude of the drop was greater even than that seen in natural disasters.
The idea of the analysis — which began before the pandemic — is to produce a way of gaining knowledge about happiness automatically. Although some countries conducted their own dedicated happiness surveys, with findings that mirrored those in the latest research, most did not.
The researchers used the data, which included people from 100 countries, to model the effects of lockdown by comparing similar countries that did and did not impose restrictions. They said they were surprised by the findings. At least in the short term, there was tentative evidence that going into lockdown led to a small net increase in happiness.
Zheng said that the effect was not universal, however — and this made sense. “On the one hand, lockdown policies might make people feel secure, and not as scared. On the other hand, in a lockdown when you cannot have social activities, it’s another emotional stress. The impact of lockdown policies perhaps runs in two directions.”
