How Experts React: The World Health Organization’s Appraisal of COVID-19 via Communication Patterns

Abstract

How do COVID-19 experts psychologically manage the pandemic and its effects? Using a full year of press briefings (January 2020–January 2021) from the World Health Organization (N = 126), this paper evaluated the relationship between communication patterns and COVID-19 cases and deaths. The data suggest as COVID-19 cases and deaths increased, health experts tended to think about the virus in a more formal and analytic manner. Experts also communicated with fewer cognitive processing terms, which typically indicate people “working through” a crisis. This report offers a lens into the internal states of COVID-19 experts and their organization as they gradually learned about the virus and its daily impact.