Emotional changes in Japanese blog space resulting from the 3.11 earthquake

Abstract

We quantified the emotional changes observed in social media after major disasters, focusing especially on the Japanese blog space after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. We checked the appearances of Japanese adjectives and found that special emotion adjectives, such as ‘impatient’, and ‘frustrating’ which involve the want to help others but the person has no means to and feels frustrated, occur with considerably increasing frequency. To visualize social mood, we drew a co-occurrence network of adjectives showing a major topological change at the site of the quake. Measuring emotional changes after an emergency has been difficult, but, our research has the potential to achieve it.