Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Novel Surveillance Approach For Disaster Mental Health, Oliver Gruebner, Sarah R. Lowe, Martin Sykora, Karen Shankardass, S V. Subramanian, Sandro Galea

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Background

Disasters have substantial consequences for population mental health. Social media data present an opportunity for mental health surveillance after disasters to help identify areas of mental health needs. We aimed to 1) identify specific basic emotions from Twitter for the greater New York City area during Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall on October 29, 2012, and to 2) detect and map spatial temporal clusters representing excess risk of these emotions.

Methods

We applied an advanced sentiment analysis on 344,957 Twitter tweets in the study area over eleven days, from October 22 to November 1, 2012, to extract basic emotions, …