Real World Worry Dataset (RWWD) captures the emotional responses of UK residents to COVID-19 at a point in time where the impact of the COVID19 situation affected the lives of all individuals in the UK. The data were collected on the 6th and 7th of April 2020, a time at which the UK was under lockdown (news, 2020), and death tolls were increasing. On April 6, 5,373 people in the UK had died of the virus, and 51,608 tested positive. On the day before data collection, the Queen addressed the nation via a television broadcast. Furthermore, it was also announced that Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to intensive care in a hospital for COVID-19 symptoms.

The RWWD is a ground truth dataset that used a direct survey method and obtained written accounts of people alongside data of their felt emotions while writing. As such, the dataset does not rely on third-person annotation but can resort to direct self-reported emotions. Two versions of RWWD are presented, each consisting of 2,500 English texts representing the participants’ genuine emotional responses to Corona situation in the UK: the Long RWWD consists of texts that were openended in length and asked the participants to express their feelings as they wish. The Short RWWD asked the same people also to express their feelings in Tweet-sized texts. The latter was chosen to facilitate the use of this dataset for Twitter data research.