# Emotion Regulation and Dynamics of Moral Concerns During the Early COVID-19 Pandemic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Leveraging Label Correlations in a Multi-label Setting: A Case Study in Emotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15842/) (2022)
- [Using Emotion Embeddings to Transfer Knowledge Between Emotions, Languages, and Annotation Formats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00171/) (2022)
- [Directed Social Regard: Surfacing Targeted Advocacy, Opposition, Aid, Harms, and Victimization in Online Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00776/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended daily life around the globe, posing a threat to public health. Intuitively, we expect that surging cases and deaths would lead to fear, distress and other negative emotions. However, using state-of-the-art methods to measure sentiment, emotions, and moral concerns in social media messages posted in the early stage of the pandemic, we see a counter-intuitive rise in positive affect. We hypothesize that the increase of positivity is associated with a decrease of uncertainty and emotion regulation. Finally, we identify a partisan divide in moral and emotional reactions that emerged after the first US death. Overall, these results show how collective emotional states have changed since the pandemic began, and how social media can provide a useful tool to understand, and even regulate, diverse patterns underlying human affect.