"With Your Help... We Begin to Heal": Social Media Expressions of Gratitude in the Aftermath of Disaster

In the aftermath of disasters, communities struggle to recover from the physical and emotional tolls of the event, often without needed social support. Social media may serve to bridge the distance between the affected community and those outside who are willing to offer support. This exploratory study uses Twitter as a lens for examining gratitude for support provisions in the aftermath of disasters. Gratitude for support is examined in the context of two significant U.S. disasters, a tornado that devastated Alabama and the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Observed expressions of gratitude for social support from each community differed from what would be expected based on established factors relating to social support in the aftermath of the disaster. These findings offer ways for social media – as a window into real-time community behaviors relating to response and healing after disaster – to contribute to the provision of mental health resources and monitoring community resilience and recovery.

[1]  G W Russell,et al.  Sympathy and altruism in response to disasters. , 1990, The Journal of social psychology.

[2]  Axel Bruns,et al.  Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere , 2011 .

[3]  Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar,et al.  Experimental perspectives on learning from imbalanced data , 2007, ICML '07.

[4]  K. Kaniasty,et al.  Received and Perceived Social Support Following Natural Disaster1 , 1990 .

[5]  E. Greenglass,et al.  Helping Following Natural Disasters: A Social‐Motivational Analysis , 2009 .

[6]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  Trauma in Real Time: Talking and Avoiding Online Conversations About the Death of Princess Diana , 2002 .

[7]  Burr Settles,et al.  Closing the Loop: Fast, Interactive Semi-Supervised Annotation With Queries on Features and Instances , 2011, EMNLP.

[8]  S. Cobb.  Presidential Address-1976. Social support as a moderator of life stress. , 1976, Psychosomatic medicine.

[9]  G. Bonanno,et al.  Postdisaster psychological intervention since 9/11. , 2011, The American psychologist.

[10]  Frederick M Burkle,et al.  Three Decades of Disasters: A Review of Disaster-Specific Literature from 1977–2009 , 2009, Prehospital and Disaster Medicine.

[11]  Carlos Castillo,et al.  What to Expect When the Unexpected Happens: Social Media Communications Across Crises , 2015, CSCW.

[12]  Graham J. Williams.  Data Mining with Rattle and R: The Art of Excavating Data for Knowledge Discovery , 2011 .

[13]  Thomas G. Dietterich,et al.  A hybrid learning system for recognizing user tasks from desktop activities and email messages , 2006, IUI '06.

[14]  K. Crawford,et al.  Sharing news, making sense, saying thanks: patterns of talk on Twitter during the Queensland floods , 2013 .

[15]  Amanda Lee Hughes,et al.  Crisis in a Networked World , 2009 .

[16]  S. Joseph,et al.  Psychological assessment of growth following adversity: A review. , 2012 .

[17]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods , 2010 .

[18]  Mark Dredze,et al.  How Social Media Will Change Public Health , 2012, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[19]  B. Weiner,et al.  Whom Would You Rather Help: An Acquaintance Not Responsible for Her Plight or a Responsible Sibling? , 2003, The Journal of social psychology.

[20]  Stephen Joseph,et al.  Positive Change Following Trauma and Adversity: A Review , 2004, Journal of traumatic stress.

[21]  Fred Lerner,et al.  Positive Changes Following Adversity , 2010 .

[22]  M. McCullough,et al.  Gratitude in Practice and the Practice of Gratitude , 2012 .

[23]  James W. Pennebaker,et al.  Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2007) , 2007 .

[24]  F. Norris,et al.  60,000 Disaster Victims Speak: Part I. An Empirical Review of the Empirical Literature, 1981—2001 , 2002, Psychiatry.

[25]  Christian E. Waugh,et al.  What good are positive emotions in crises? A prospective study of resilience and emotions following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[26]  Sympathy and altruism in response to disasters: A Dutch and Canadian comparison , 1997 .

[27]  B. Weitz.  Hosted By , 2003 .

[28]  Fran H. Norris,et al.  Social support in the aftermath of disasters, catastrophes, and acts of terrorism: altruistic, overwhelmed, uncertain, antagonistic, and patriotic communities. , 2004 .