The language of crisis: spatiotemporal effects of COVID-19 pandemic dynamics on health crisis communications by political leaders

Benjamin J Mandl; Ben Y Reis

doi:10.1038/s41746-021-00554-w

The language of crisis: spatiotemporal effects of COVID-19 pandemic dynamics on health crisis communications by political leaders

NPJ Digit Med. 2022 Jan 10;5(1):1. doi: 10.1038/s41746-021-00554-w.

Authors

Benjamin J Mandl^{1

2}, Ben Y Reis^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Predictive Medicine Group, Computational Health Informatics Program, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
² Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA.
³ Predictive Medicine Group, Computational Health Informatics Program, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA. Ben_Reis@harvard.edu.
⁴ Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. Ben_Reis@harvard.edu.

Abstract

In times of crisis, communication by leaders is essential for mobilizing an effective public response. During the COVID-19 pandemic, compliance with public health guidelines has been critical for the prevention of infections and deaths. We assembled a corpus of over 1500 pandemic-related speeches, containing over 4 million words, delivered by all 50 US state governors during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed the semantic, grammatical and linguistic-complexity properties of these speeches, and examined their relationships to COVID-19 case rates over space and time. We found that as COVID-19 cases rose, governors used stricter language to issue guidance, employed greater negation to defend their actions and highlight prevailing uncertainty, and used more extreme descriptive adjectives. As cases surged to their highest levels, governors used shorter words with fewer syllables. Investigating and understanding such characteristic responses to stress is important for improving effective public communication during major health crises.

Grants and funding

R01 MH117599/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United States