  The COVID-19 pandemic has upended daily life around the globe, posing a
threat to public health. Intuitively, we expect that surging cases and deaths
would lead to fear, distress and other negative emotions. However, using
state-of-the-art methods to measure sentiment, emotions, and moral concerns in
social media messages posted in the early stage of the pandemic, we see a
counter-intuitive rise in positive affect. We hypothesize that the increase of
positivity is associated with a decrease of uncertainty and emotion regulation.
Finally, we identify a partisan divide in moral and emotional reactions that
emerged after the first US death. Overall, these results show how collective
emotional states have changed since the pandemic began, and how social media
can provide a useful tool to understand, and even regulate, diverse patterns
underlying human affect.
