Alumnus Fred Atilla wins Unilever Research Prize 2022

Cognitive psychologist and alumnus Fred Atilla of Erasmus University Rotterdam has won the Unilever Research Prize 2022 for his research on how attention and emotions towards COVID-19 evolved among Twitter users during the first months of the pandemic and identified factors explaining these changes. The study showed that the physical distance to a COVID-19 hotspot influences public attention and sentiment among Twitter users. Fred Atilla analyzed 300,000 COVID-19-related posts that appeared on Twitter between January and April 2020. His research examined the emotions of Twitter users. Since geographical location information is often linked to Twitter data, he could also calculate the distance from the message's country of origin to the nearest COVID-infected region. Thus, he examined how Twitter users' physical distance from COVID-19 affected their attention and emotions. It was found that as the disease got closer, more tweets were posted, and the average sentiment in the tweets became more negative.