CASOS Graduate Student Earns Runner-Up in SBP-BRiMS 2024 Best Paper Award

Samantha Phillips, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon University’s Software and Societal Systems Department, has been recognized as the Runner-Up for the Best Paper Award at the SBP-BRiMS 2024 conference. The award was given for her insightful research paper, "Moral and Emotional Influences on Attitude Stability Towards COVID-19 Vaccines on Social Media," co-authored with Lynnette H.X. Ng, Wenqi Zhou, and Kathleen M. Carley.

The research examines how moral and emotional language shapes the attitudes of social media users towards COVID-19 vaccines. Drawing on over a million tweets, the study delves into the variance in users’ vaccine stances, analyzing how emotions like fear, anger, and sadness, as well as moral values such as liberty and fairness, impact attitude stability.

This paper stood out at the SBP-BRiMS conference for its relevance to public health communication strategies, particularly in countering misinformation and vaccine hesitancy. The SBP-BRiMS conference is a leading venue for research on social, behavioral, and cultural modeling, making this recognition a significant achievement for Phillips and the CASOS team.

Phillips’ work offers vital insights for designing more effective public health campaigns, highlighting the role of emotional and moral messaging in influencing public perceptions of vaccines during a global health crisis.