Emotion Analysis of Comments from vaccine-related YouTube Videos: Understanding the Public's Response to COVID-19 Vaccination

After the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in 2020, vaccination was seen as a major intervention in transmission reduction and in achieving herd immunity. However, initial response of the public to vaccination has been met with uncertainties. Moreover, while the first world countries have increased mobility due to vaccination, the Philippines have yet to cover more regions in the next few months. With YouTube being the most popular video-based social media platform for seeking information, this study explored emotions expressed by the general public among COVID-19 vaccine-promoting, vaccine-neutral and vaccine-discouraging YouTube videos. NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon was used to identify the emotions expressed in the video comments from the three video-tone categories. The W-ANOVA and Games-Howell post-hoc results showed that vaccine-promoting videos have significantly higher anticipation, joy, and surprise emotion scores, while sadness and fear emotion scores are significantly higher in vaccine-discouraging videos. Furthermore, trust emotion score is significantly high in vaccine-neutral videos. Understanding the basic emotions expressed by viewers on vaccine-related videos may serve as a guide in crafting effective health promotion campaigns and could provide insights on other complex emotions related to vaccination. including hesitancy and envy.