Anxiety is on the rise as the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown continues, Italy-based AI company found

On Tuesday, we wrote about Expert System, an Italian-based artificial intelligence company that uses semantics and natural language to monitor the emotions and general sentiment around the COVID-19 pandemic expressed by people in the US and UK across social media. Expert System found that negative emotions spiked as coronavirus (covid-19) spread continues.

Today, the company releases its daily update for yesterday. The updates reflects the changing attitudes and emotions of the English speaking world and the reasons driving these daily changes. The company found that anxiety is on the rise as the covid-19 lockdown continues.

Based on an analysis of around 63,000 social media posts in English over the last 24 hours, “fear,” is still the single most widespread emotion, even if the overall sentiment is slightly more positive than yesterday.

The map above represents the emotions derived from the semantic analysis of social media content over a 24-hour period. Expert System’s artificial intelligence technology extracts the emotions, which are then analyzed and interpreted by Sociometrica.

Yesterday, the feeling of “shame “was on the rise because of the delays in organizing the virus response and the insufficient ability, even today, to cope with the emergency, especially in terms of health. Today, the feeling that is on the rise, in terms of growth, is “anxiety,” because of the uncertainty around what is happening, how they are supposed to act as citizens and which drugs or remedies are safe or suitable to combat the disease.

“Anxiety” is also related to the political conflict and difference of views around when to reopen the country and the looming uncertainty for the coming weeks. In terms of positive feelings, “hope” and “love” are expressed towards health care personnel. Over yesterday, all negative feelings have decreased, from 43.5% to 42.5%; neutral feelings have also decreased over the last 24 hours, from 34.9% to 33.6%. Meanwhile, positive emotions have increased from 21.6% yesterday to 23.9% today.