Emotion and Worry Measurement Comparison of United Kingdom and Thailand during the First COVID-19 Lockdown Situation

Abstract

The epidemic situation of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the measures to control the spread of the disease that the government enforced have greatly affected the daily lives of Thai people because they must suffer various pressures, stress, and anxiety. For this research, the researchers compared the anxiety caused by the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) between the UK and Thailand to see if they are similar or different. In sentiment analysis, the collection of data comes from the discussion on the web forums. In this research, the researcher used information from pantip.com to collect topics related to coronavirus disease 2019 and disease control measures from the government from March 2020 to May 2020. It was found that 10,746 available thread titles were extracted from all topics, and the first collected threads were then re-checked to see if their content could be used for further analysis. The chosen topics were analyzed by counting words that expressed various emotions. Thailand's information will use the AI for THAI platform, which provides artificial intelligence (AI) services under the concept of 'Thai AI' by extracting emojis to express emotions that will be converted into words. The results found that Thai people responded most emotionally to the matter in a sad mood. The results are compared with the UK data, including a sample of 2,500 people living in the UK, by having respondents write a short text and a long text of 5,000 examples of how they felt about the epidemic situation and government measures at that time. Emotions were extracted through the LIWC technique, and the results showed that most of them had more anxiety than other feelings, which were different from those in Thailand. However, most of the sorrows and worries influence jobs and incomes in both countries, but in Thailand, debt is another factor that causes more sadness than just worry. According to this research, researchers consider it essential to study and analyze people's emotions to know the impact on people's emotions, which may affect their lifestyles when faced with other serious disease outbreaks in the future. The agency or organization can use this information to plan and adapt the measurements to have the least impact on people's mental health.