LAUSR

A sudden outbreak of the Zika virus led to public panic and discussion on social Q&A forums. Most research studies concentrated on what the public discussed about the Zika virus. However, how they felt during the Zika virus outbreak reflects the emotional stability of the public, which has a positive significance in public health monitoring, intervention and service. For this paper, we conducted a sentiment analysis of Zika‐related posts on Yahoo! Answers during the outbreak of the Zika virus to investigate how emotions of the public changed overtime and if users' emotions could be influenced by others. It was found that significantly more negative emotions appeared when an outbreak started in Brazil, yet people's reactions became milder afterwards. Besides, a small positive correlation between the sentiment characteristics of the questions and the received answers implies the exchanges of emotions between questioners and answerers.