{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,21]],"date-time":"2026-03-21T20:49:42Z","timestamp":1774126182675,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":58,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,16]],"date-time":"2020-06-16T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1592265600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["BDCC"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The COVID-19 pandemic forced countries all over the world to take unprecedented measures, like nationwide lockdowns. To adequately understand the emotional and social repercussions, a large-scale reconstruction of how people perceived these unexpected events is necessary but currently missing. We address this gap through social media by introducing MERCURIAL (Multi-layer Co-occurrence Networks for Emotional Profiling), a framework which exploits linguistic networks of words and hashtags to reconstruct social discourse describing real-world events. We use MERCURIAL to analyse 101,767 tweets from Italy, the first country to react to the COVID-19 threat with a nationwide lockdown. The data were collected between the 11th and 17th March, immediately after the announcement of the Italian lockdown and the WHO declaring COVID-19 a pandemic. Our analysis provides unique insights into the psychological burden of this crisis, focussing on\u2014(i) the Italian official campaign for self-quarantine (#iorestoacasa), (ii) national lockdown (#italylockdown), and (iii) social denounce (#sciacalli). Our exploration unveils the emergence of complex emotional profiles, where anger and fear (towards political debates and socio-economic repercussions) coexisted with trust, solidarity, and hope (related to the institutions and local communities). We discuss our findings in relation to mental well-being issues and coping mechanisms, like instigation to violence, grieving, and solidarity. We argue that our framework represents an innovative thermometer of emotional status, a powerful tool for policy makers to quickly gauge feelings in massive audiences and devise appropriate responses based on cognitive data.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/bdcc4020014","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,16]],"date-time":"2020-06-16T13:20:43Z","timestamp":1592313643000},"page":"14","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":46,"title":["#lockdown: Network-Enhanced Emotional Profiling in the Time of COVID-19"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"4","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1810-9699","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Massimo","family":"Stella","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Complex Science Consulting, 73100 Lecce, Italy"}]},{"given":"Valerio","family":"Restocchi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK"}]},{"given":"Simon","family":"De Deyne","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Human Complex Data Hub, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"676","DOI":"10.1016\/S0140-6736(20)30461-X","article-title":"How to fight an infodemic","volume":"395","author":"Zarocostas","year":"2020","journal-title":"Lancet"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cinelli, M., Quattrociocchi, W., Galeazzi, A., Valensise, C.M., Brugnoli, E., Schmidt, A.L., Zola, P., Zollo, F., and Scala, A. 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