  The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel SARS-Coronavirus-2 (n-SARS-CoV-2)
has impacted people's lives in unprecedented ways. During the time of the
pandemic, social vloggers have used social media to actively share their
opinions or experiences in quarantine. This paper collected videos from YouTube
to track emotional responses in conversational vlogs and their potential
associations with events related to the pandemic. In particular, vlogs uploaded
from locations in New York City were analyzed given that this was one of the
first epicenters of the pandemic in the United States. We observed some common
patterns in vloggers' acoustic and linguistic features across the time span of
the quarantine, which is indicative of changes in emotional reactivity.
Additionally, we investigated fluctuations of acoustic and linguistic patterns
in relation to COVID-19 events in the New York area (e.g. the number of daily
new cases, number of deaths, and extension of stay-at-home order and state of
emergency). Our results indicate that acoustic features, such as
zero-crossing-rate, jitter, and shimmer, can be valuable for analyzing
emotional reactivity in social media videos. Our findings further indicate that
some of the peaks of the acoustic and linguistic indices align with COVID-19
events, such as the peak in the number of deaths and emergency declaration.
