Quantifying societal emotional resilience to natural disasters from geo-located social media content

Journal Article (2022)
Author(s)

Krishna C. Bathina (Indiana University)

Marijn ten Thij (Maastricht University, Indiana University, TU Delft - Applied Probability)

Johan Bollen (Indiana University)

Research Group
Applied Probability
Copyright
© 2022 Krishna Bathina, M.C. ten Thij, Johan Bollen
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269315
More Info
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Publication Year
2022
Language
English
Copyright
© 2022 Krishna Bathina, M.C. ten Thij, Johan Bollen
Research Group
Applied Probability
Issue number
6 6
Volume number
17
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Abstract

Natural disasters can have devastating and long-lasting effects on a community’s emotional well-being. These effects may be distributed unequally, affecting some communities more profoundly and possibly over longer time periods than others. Here, we analyze the effects of four major US hurricanes, namely, Irma, Harvey, Florence, and Dorian on the emotional well-being of the affected communities and regions. We show that a community’s emotional response to a hurricane event can be measured from the content of social media that its population posted before, during, and after the hurricane. For each hurricane making landfall in the US, we observe a significant decrease in sentiment in the affected areas before and during the hurricane followed by a rapid return to pre-hurricane baseline, often within 1-2 weeks. However, some communities exhibit markedly different rates of decline and return to previous equilibrium levels. This points towards the possibility of measuring the emotional resilience of communities from the dynamics of their online emotional response.

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