The Impact of Shanghai Epidemic, China, 2022 on Public Psychology: A Sentiment Analysis of Microblog Users by Data Mining

The Shanghai epidemic (COVID-19) is another large-scale epidemic in China's central cities in the post-epidemic era from the end of March 2022. It is of great significance to study the public's attitude towards the Shanghai epidemic to support healthy psychology and a positive attitude. This study used crawler technology to obtain the Weibo data related to the epidemic situation in Shanghai that was published by users. The crawled microblogs were preprocessed, and the BosonNLP sentiment dictionary for attitude classification was selected. The Chinese vocabulary ontology for 21 emotion classifications was also used. The results showed that the general attitude of the public in Shanghai was positive. This fluctuated greatly in the initial stage and gradually increased in the later stage. Through text mining, it is clear that goods and materials, nucleic acid virus testing, and other aspects of the epidemic in Shanghai are concerning for the public. The public attitude in areas that are close to the epidemic center is relatively more negative. The study can provide references for policymakers to fight COVID-19 by improving public attitude and solving urgent matters.

Automated summary

The study of public attitude towards the Shanghai epidemic is of great importance for maintaining mental health and a positive outlook. This study utilized crawler technology to obtain Weibo data related to the epidemic in Shanghai and classified attitudes using sentiment dictionaries. The results showed that the overall attitude of the public in Shanghai is positive, although there were fluctuations in the early stages of the epidemic. Public concerns primarily focused on the supply of goods and virus testing. Public attitudes in areas close to the epicenter were relatively more negative.