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COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?

COVID-19 expanded rapidly throughout the world, with enormous health, social, and economic consequences. Mental health is the most affected by extreme negative emotions and stress, but it has been an underestimated part of human life during the pandemic. We hypothesized that people may have responde...

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Autores principales: Skórka, Piotr, Grzywacz, Beata, Moroń, Dawid, Lenda, Magdalena
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9566158/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36232263
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912969
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author Skórka, Piotr
Grzywacz, Beata
Moroń, Dawid
Lenda, Magdalena
author_facet Skórka, Piotr
Grzywacz, Beata
Moroń, Dawid
Lenda, Magdalena
author_sort Skórka, Piotr
collection PubMed
description COVID-19 expanded rapidly throughout the world, with enormous health, social, and economic consequences. Mental health is the most affected by extreme negative emotions and stress, but it has been an underestimated part of human life during the pandemic. We hypothesized that people may have responded to the pandemic spontaneously with increased interest in and creation of funny internet memes. Using Google and Google Trends, we revealed that the number of and interest in funny internet memes related to COVID-19 exploded during the spring 2020 lockdown. The interest in coronavirus memes was positively correlated with interest in mortality due to COVID-19 on a global scale, and positively associated with the real number of deaths and cases reported in different countries. We compared content of a random sample of 200 coronavirus memes with a random sample of 200 non-coronavirus memes found on the Internet. The sentiment analysis showed that coronavirus memes had a similar proportion of positive and negative words compared to non-coronavirus memes. However, an internet questionnaire revealed that coronavirus memes gained higher funniness scores than a random sample of non-coronavirus memes. Our results confirm that societies may have turned to humor to cope with the threat of SARS-CoV-2.
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spelling pubmed-95661582022-10-15 COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic? Skórka, Piotr Grzywacz, Beata Moroń, Dawid Lenda, Magdalena Int J Environ Res Public Health Article COVID-19 expanded rapidly throughout the world, with enormous health, social, and economic consequences. Mental health is the most affected by extreme negative emotions and stress, but it has been an underestimated part of human life during the pandemic. We hypothesized that people may have responded to the pandemic spontaneously with increased interest in and creation of funny internet memes. Using Google and Google Trends, we revealed that the number of and interest in funny internet memes related to COVID-19 exploded during the spring 2020 lockdown. The interest in coronavirus memes was positively correlated with interest in mortality due to COVID-19 on a global scale, and positively associated with the real number of deaths and cases reported in different countries. We compared content of a random sample of 200 coronavirus memes with a random sample of 200 non-coronavirus memes found on the Internet. The sentiment analysis showed that coronavirus memes had a similar proportion of positive and negative words compared to non-coronavirus memes. However, an internet questionnaire revealed that coronavirus memes gained higher funniness scores than a random sample of non-coronavirus memes. Our results confirm that societies may have turned to humor to cope with the threat of SARS-CoV-2. MDPI 2022-10-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9566158/ /pubmed/36232263 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912969 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Skórka, Piotr
Grzywacz, Beata
Moroń, Dawid
Lenda, Magdalena
COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?
title COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?
title_full COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?
title_fullStr COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?
title_full_unstemmed COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?
title_short COVID-19 in Memes: The Adaptive Response of Societies to the Pandemic?
title_sort covid-19 in memes: the adaptive response of societies to the pandemic?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9566158/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36232263
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912969
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