Understanding Emotional Disclosure via Diary-keeping in Quarantine on Social Media

TL;DR

This study investigates how people disclose emotions on social media during quarantine through quarantine diaries on Weibo. It constructs a three-stage pipeline to identify relevant emotional posts, categorize six quarantine-specific emotions, and analyze temporal dynamics from long-term and duration-based perspectives, complemented by topic modeling to reveal latent drivers of negative affect. Key findings show that negative emotions constitute a sizable portion of posts, with annoyance being the dominant negative category, and that both the prevalence and composition of emotions evolve over time and quarantine lengths. The work provides design and policy recommendations for email interventions and social-support mechanisms, leveraging diary-like self-tracking on social platforms to monitor mental health during public-health crises. Overall, it demonstrates the feasibility and value of context-specific emotion analysis in affective computing for informing health interventions during quarantine periods.

Abstract

Quarantine is a widely-adopted measure during health crises caused by highly-contagious diseases like COVID-19, yet it poses critical challenges to public mental health. Given this context, emotional disclosure on social media in the form of keeping a diary emerges as a popular way for individuals to express emotions and record their mental health status. However, the exploration of emotional disclosure via diary-keeping on social media during quarantine is underexplored, understanding which could be beneficial to facilitate emotional connections and enlighten health intervention measures. Focusing on this particular form of self-disclosure, this work proposes a quantitative approach to figure out the prevalence and changing patterns of emotional disclosure during quarantine, and the possible factors contributing to the negative emotions. We collected 58, 796 posts with the "Quarantine Diary" keyword on Weibo, a popular social media website in China. Through text classification, we capture diverse emotion categories that characterize public emotion disclosure during quarantine, such as annoyed, anxious, boring, happy, hopeful and appreciative. Based on temporal analysis, we uncover the changing patterns of emotional disclosure from long-term perspectives and period-based perspectives (e.g., the gradual decline of all negative emotions and the upsurge of the annoyed emotion near the end of quarantine). Leveraging topic modeling, we also encapsulate the possible influencing factors of negative emotions, such as freedom restriction and solitude, and uncertainty of infection and supply. We reflect on how our findings could deepen the understanding of mental health on social media and further provide practical and design implications to mitigate mental health issues during quarantine.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Example of a quarantine diary. Individuals spontaneously label the post with the hashtag #Quarantine Diary# and the Day No., and describe the contents of the diary ("[Nucleic acid test] Since I received the call in the morning, I have been looking forward to picking us up from 18:00 to 22:30. The days of centralized quarantine are finally over. I can’t drink milk but I am very healthy. I put on protective clothing, like stealing adult clothes. Then I carry my big suitcase, get on the bus arranged by the community, and continue the home quarantine [location]").
• Figure 2: The overall flow chart to understand the emotional disclosure during quarantine.
• Figure 3: The distribution of (a) relevant posts, (b) emotional posts and (c) six categories of emotional posts. The results indicated negative emotions were non-negligible.
• Figure 4: The long-term changing patterns of emotional disclosure from April 2020 to July 2022.
• Figure 5: The statistical results of post number for (a) per day and (b) different groups (including 7-day quarantine group, 14-day quarantine group and the remaining group).