• DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2209.13595
• Corpus ID: 252565110

What Are You Anxious About? Examining Subjects of Anxiety during the COVID-19 Pandemic

@article{Chen2022WhatAY,
  title={What Are You Anxious About? Examining Subjects of Anxiety during the COVID-19 Pandemic},
  author={Lucia Lushi Chen and Steven R. Wilson and Sophie Lohmann and Daniela Veronica Negraia},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2022},
  volume={abs/2209.13595}
}

• L. L. Chen, Steven R. Wilson, +1 author D. Negraia
• Published 27 September 2022
• Psychology
• ArXiv

COVID-19 poses disproportionate mental health conse- quences to the public during different phases of the pandemic. We use a computational approach to capture the specific as- pects that trigger an online community’s anxiety about the pandemic and investigate how these aspects change over time. First, we identified nine subjects of anxiety (SOAs) in a sample of Reddit posts ( N =86) from r/COVID19 support using thematic analysis. Then, we quantified Reddit users’ anxiety by training algorithms on a manually annotated sample ( N =793) to automatically label the SOAs in a larger chronological sample ( N =6,535). The nine SOAs align with items in various recently developed pandemic anxiety measurement scales. We observed that Reddit users’ concerns about health risks remained high in the first eight months of the pandemic. These concerns diminished dramatically despite the surge of cases occurring later. In general, users’ language dis-closing the SOAs became less intense as the pandemic pro- gressed. However, worries about mental health and the future increased steadily throughout the period covered in this study. People also tended to use more intense language to describe mental health concerns than health risks or death concerns. Our results suggest that this online group’s mental health con-dition does not necessarily improve despite COVID-19 grad- ually weakening as a health threat due to appropriate coun-termeasures. Our system lays the groundwork for popula- tion health and epidemiology scholars to examine aspects that provoke pandemic anxiety in a timely fashion.