Visiting green spaces or stay-at-home: Emotional changes following the lifting of the zero-COVID policy

The zero-COVID policy that China maintained during the COVID-19 pandemic was effective in controlling virus transmission, while also having a profound impact on people’s emotions. Previous studies have shown that urban green spaces (UGS) can improve people’s emotional status during pandemics. However, the specific way that UGS affects people’s emotions after lifting the zero-COVID policy is still unknown. Here, we used a regression discontinuity in time method to evaluate the effect of sentiment and emotional changes in the UGS posed by the lifting of zero-COVID policy, using 2.36 million geotagged social media data from Weibo in China. Our results show that people who visited UGS had higher sentiment scores compared to those who stayed at home. Moreover, the emotional regulation capacity of UGS significantly decreased by 0.044 units after the lifting of the zero-COVID policy. The difference also showed heterogeneity across provinces, and UGS demonstrated greater emotional regulation capacity for women, highly educated individuals, and two age groups (18–22 and 33–40). This study emphasizes the critical role of UGS to mitigate emotional distress during public health crises and highlights the potential of social media data in providing timely policy interventions.