Francisco E. Cabrera

Informational divergence emerged as a significant phenomenon during the COVID-19 health crisis. This period was characterized by information overload and changes in the communication of public health recommendations and policies by authorities and media outlets. This study examines the impact of such divergence on the population’s mental health, focusing on primary emotions expressed in comments across digital ecosystems. A media EMIC approach was used to analyze digital ecosystems during March and April 2020. Data were collected from Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, official press websites, and internet forums, yielding 3,456,387 communications. These were filtered to extract emotion-expressing content, resulting in 106,261 communications. Communications were categorized into primary emotions (anger, disgust, joy, fear, and sadness) using an exclusionary emotion assignment procedure. Analysis techniques included polarity and term frequency calculation, content analysis using Natural Language Understanding, emotion intensity measurement using IBM Watson Analytics, and data reliability assessment using the ISMA-OWA operator. The findings suggest that exposure to informational divergence from governments, health organizations, and media negatively affected mental health, evidenced by sadness, fear, disgust, and anger, which are associated with elevated levels of stress, anxiety, and information fatigue. In contrast, information perceived as reflecting coordination, support, and solidarity elicited positive emotional responses, particularly joy.

The visual design elements and principles (VDEPs) can trigger behavioural changes and emotions in the viewer, but their effects on brain activity are not clearly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationships between brain activity and colour (cold/warm), light (dark/bright), movement (fast/slow), and balance (symmetrical/asymmetrical) VDEPs. We used the public DEAP dataset with the electroencephalogram signals of 32 participants recorded while watching music videos. The characteristic VDEPs for each second of the videos were manually tagged for by a team of two visual communication experts. Results show that variations in the light/value, rhythm/movement, and balance in the music video sequences produce a statistically significant effect over the mean absolute power of the Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma EEG bands (p < 0.05). Furthermore, we trained a Convolutional Neural Network that successfully predicts the VDEP of a video fragment solely by the EEG signal of the viewer with an accuracy ranging from 0.7447 for Colour VDEP to 0.9685 for Movement VDEP. Our work shows evidence that VDEPs affect brain activity in a variety of distinguishable ways and that a deep learning classifier can infer visual VDEP properties of the videos from EEG activity.

This study examines how confinement measures established during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis affected the emotions of the population. For this purpose, public sentiment on social media and digital ecosystems in Spain is analyzed. We identified affective tones towards media and citizens published on social media focusing on six basic emotions: anger, fear, joy, sadness, disgust and uncertainty. The main contribution of this work is the evidence of contagious sentiments and, consequently, the possibility of using this new dimension of social media as a form of a “collective therapy”. This paper contributes to understanding the impact of confinement measures in a pandemic from the point of view of emotional health. This analysis provides a set of practical implications that can guide conceptual and empirical work in health crisis management with an alternative approach, especially useful for decision-making processes facing emergency responses and health crises, even in an unprecedented global health crisis such as the traumatic events caused by the COVID-19 disease.

The Open Government emerges as a new paradigm and model of relationship between society, administrations and governors: collaborative, multidirectional, transparent and oriented to the participation of citizens, both in monitoring and in public decision-making. Communication is one of the main axes where this new paradigm is sustained, since it helps governments to show and justify the actions carried out, and which, on many occasions, are discussed by citizens. Government communication, therefore, is framed within political communication itself and refers to the exercise that determines the management agenda of institutions, attitudes and processes, its main objective being to generate a consensus leaving aside particular interests of political parties and personalities, to focus on management and public administration, because without a general acceptance of the principles there can be no successful management. In this context, the country brand is one of the items where consensus is fundamental, a bad management of the communication around it, can cause discrepancy that affects the Open Government. This paper analyzes a real case of communication in relation to the Spanish Country brand (España Global) and how it has affected the commitment and belonging of citizens.

This paper presents a novel approach for ranking tourist destinations based on the eigenvector method for pairwise voting (EMPV). The proposed approach relies solely on pairwise comparisons instead of direct-vote polling. The EMPV method was tested over a real-world case application to rank various tourist destinations in the Costa del Sol region, Spain, and its outcome was compared against a polling approach using a Likert-type scale. Results show that the EMPV and the Likert-based approach provided different rankings of preferred tourist destinations. Furthermore, both the EMPV and the Likert-based approaches shared the same preference patterns per ranking position, thus confirming that the reported predilection of the tourist is independent of the measurement approach. Finally, results show that the ranking produced by the EMPV methodology was highly related to the real number of visitors of the Costa del Sol tourist destinations, surpassing the Likert-based approach in both ordering and value similarities.

Managing Intangibles Relational Capital for the sustainability of the Energy Sector in the Social Media