Positive and Solidarity Messages Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Jason Zhu and Version 1 by Xuechang Xian.

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused significant stress in daily lives, which potentially increases frustration, fear, and resentful emotions. Managing stress is complex, but helps to alleviate negative psychological effects. The COVID-19 outbreak, and its subsequent effects have increased the risk of poor mental health outcomes among the general population, which is a significant challenge for tackling the pandemic. Thus, creating a positive atmosphere in crisis communication is imperative. To this end, we attempted to understand how the public coped with stress during the COVID-19 pandemic by using Macao as a case study. A total of 104,827 COVID-19 related posts were then collected from Facebook through data mining, from 1 January to 31 December 2020. Divominer, a big-data analysis tool supported by computational algorithm, was employed in this study to identify themes and facilitate machine coding and analysis.

  • COVID-19
  • positive psychology
  • solidarity
  • anti-epidemic
  • Macao
  • automatic content analysis
  • word2vec
  • semantic network analysis
  • Facebook
  • natural language processing

1. COVID-19 Infodemic and Positive Communication in Macao

The highly transmissible and contagious nature of the SARS-CoV-2 has posed a threat to public health and safety. The World Health Organization declared coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) a public health emergency of international concern in March 2020 [1]. To date, the ongoing pandemic has led to over 270 million infections and approximately 5 million deaths [2].
During the pandemic, social media platforms have been increasingly used to convey impactful messages to the masses [3,4]. Although it is considered an effective form of communication for raising public awareness, negative messages shared across social media can in turn fuel negative emotions, such as sadness, discrimination, and hatred [5,6]. This may subsequently lead to harmful behavioral tendencies, such as blaming others, engaging in violence, and contemplating or attempting suicide, all of which have been particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic [7].
Extant literature has examined the impact of positive affect in communication [8,9]. As a general dimension of mood, positive affect reflects the subjective well-being of individuals when engaging with the environment. High positive affect among the public indicates more subjective well-being and engagement [9]. Therefore, to alleviate negative impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, positive affect should be maintained.
As one of the world’s most densely populated cities that heavily relies on tourism and gambling industries [10], Macao has recorded only 77 confirmed COVID-19 cases and zero deaths as of 10 November 2021 [11]. The local government’s efforts to contain the spread of the virus have earned nationwide praise [12,13]. Several preventive policies, such as social distancing, self-quarantine, and mask-wearing, have been enacted and have achieved satisfactory outcomes. Meanwhile, laypeople’s contributions are evident in their commendation of the government’s and frontline workers’ efforts and in uplifting messages on social media. Phrases and hashtags, such as “we stand in solidarity” and “fight together against the COVID-19”, were frequently disseminated by Macao citizens online, creating a sense of togetherness through collaborative efforts in fighting the pandemic.

2. Positive Psychology Attributes

Individuals’ subjective well-being is associated with positive psychology attributes, such as solidarity, hope, and gratitude [14,15,16]. Solidarity refers to unity, or collective actions, or mutual support within a group, which is formed through common interests to improve outcomes in all aspects of life [17]. Prior research has found that shared threat experience increases identification with those suffering the same fate, which leads to increased solidarity [18]. This mechanism is also held true in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, where solidarity among individuals was found to be more profound than that within other previous crises [19,20]. Given that a viable way to contain the disease is cooperation at individual, national and global levels, the positive response of solidarity can thus be considered a key resource in coping with the crisis by facilitating internal or external cooperation [18,21]. For example, with increased social bonding, solidarity was found effective in promoting people’s willingness to support for the COVID-19 infection control measures enforced by the government [22].
Hope is considered a powerful source of motivation to develop resilience and cope with stressful situations by alleviating negative psychological factors, such as distress, anxiety, and depression [15,23]. Individuals with a higher level of hope tend to have lower levels of depressive symptoms and anxiety [24]. In other words, hope enables one to adapt to a stressful situation, such as the COVID-19 crisis [25].
Optimism is generally defined as an inclination toward expecting a positive, favorable, or desirable outcome. It provides a positive outlook for people to make efforts when facing difficulties [26]. Optimism mediates spiritual well-being’s effect on negative psychological emotions, and a higher level of optimism leads to lower levels of mental distress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms [27,28]. Therefore, optimism is considered a protective factor to mitigate the impact of stress on psychological health and essential for meaning-centered intervention [29].
Gratitude is a positive response to a good outcome of another individual’s efforts. It encourages prosocial responses among the beneficiaries and is associated with lower depressive symptoms, burnout, and suicide risk in a non-crisis context [16,30,31]. In a crisis context, gratitude is a key driver of adaptation to crises, such as COVID-19 [32].
In positive psychology, grit is defined as perseverance and passion toward one’s pursuit of long-term goals [33]. Studies have demonstrated that grit can predict psychological well-being, such as higher positive emotions, and positively affect mental health and social performance [34,35]. Grit has also been shown to buffer mental distress caused by the fear of COVID-19 [36].
In light of these findings, solidarity, hope, optimism, gratitude, and grit, which are rooted in positive psychological theories, can be considered coping resources in response to the pandemic. While consistently sharing messages about positive coping have been employed as a strategy to inspire the public, studies of positive coping messages have been more focused on discourse analysis from a qualitative perspective [4,37], where researcher bias is inevitable. In addition, studies of negative information, such as discriminatory and stigmatized information linked to COVID-19, have received much attention [5,38]. However, there is a limited understanding of the mechanism of the dissemination of positive coping information, which helps mitigate social anxiety and promote society’s well-being. This indicates the need for more empirical studies of positive responses in the context of health crises. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to examine the corpus of Facebook posts to understand how positive coping messages were propagated and to determine the level of public engagement with positive messages during the COVID-19 outbreak in Macao.

3. Measurements

Public response and user engagement in mitigating a negative outcome of a crisis interact with different crisis stages [39]. These stages constitute the crisis lifecycle, which follows an evolutionary pattern from precursor to resolution. In this study, a framework was adopted for the association between positive response and public engagement based on the crisis lifecycle model proposed by Fink [40]. A crisis is a dynamic and cycling process, which has been recognized since 1980 [41]. Several crisis lifecycle models have been developed for studying crisis management [42,43,44]. Considering that the COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing crisis with a complicated process of evolution, and that Fink’s model provides a detailed and clear understanding of a crisis [45], the model thus served as a theoretical basis for the study. Fink’s model describes four stages of a crisis: prodromal, acute, chronic, and resolution [40]. Specifically, the prodromal stage refers to the preparation stage, which highlights the emergent clues of a potential crisis and the beginning of taking preventive measures. It plays a crucial role in determining whether the stakeholders are moving toward a crisis or wellness. Macao has been on high alert since the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. The local government has taken preemptive measures to respond to the imminent threat of the health crisis [46]. The first stage, thus, corresponds to the starting point of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan at the beginning of January 2020 [5]. Following the prodromal stage (1–21 January 2020), the acute stage is triggered by an event that indicates the beginning of a crisis [39,40]. During this period, damage occurs at a tremendous rate with considerable fatalities, property losses, and security losses. These correspond to the period between 22 January and 19 April 2020, when the pandemic broke out in Macao [11]. The chronic stage highlights the lasting effect of the crisis. This corresponds to the period between 20 April and 31 December 2020, when the outbreak in Macao had been brought under control [47]. The last stage is the resolution stage, which indicates that the crisis has ceased. Considering the current threat of the pandemic in Macao, we did not include this stage in our study. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]Considering the current threat of the pandemic in Macao, we did not include this stage in our study.

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