Classmates Finn Riley-Belew, Michael Walsh, and I looked into a shift in people tweeting about their feelings towards work.

We hypothesized that people increased their focus on emotion when discussing work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using the coding language R, we collected our sample of random tweets that contained “#work” from January 2019 and January 2021.

Using the computer program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), we examined the percentage of each tweet that included words that are associated with emotion and the percentage related to work.

Our data showed that there was an increase in correlation between people’e focus on work and emotion in tweets that include #work from 2019 and 2021. Additionally, the 2021 tweets showed that tweets that mention #work had generally more negative words and fewer positive words. This shows that, in general, there were more tweets about work post-COVID and they were mainly negative.