Mental Health and Social Contact During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

By Eiko I. Fried, Faidra Papanikolaou, Sacha Epskamp. Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2020

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For many students, the COVID-19 pandemic caused once-in-a-lifetime disruptions of daily life. In March 2020, during the beginning of the outbreak in the Netherlands, we used ecological momentary assessment to follow 80 undergraduate students four times per day for 14 days to assess mental health, social contact, and COVID-19-related variables. Despite rapidly increasing rates of infections and deaths, we observed decreases in anxiety, loneliness, and COVID-19-related concerns, especially in the first few days. Other mental health variables, such as stress levels, remained stable, whereas depressive symptoms increased. Despite social-distancing measures implemented by the Dutch government halfway through our study, students showed no changes in the frequency of in-person social activities. Dynamic network models identified potential vicious cycles between mental health variables and being alone, which predicted concerns about COVID-19 and was followed by further mental health problems. Findings and implications are discussed in detail.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26120480d4a365d55f6f73a06371377e7469357b

Citations in the corpus

• Mental Health and Behavior of College Students During the Early Phases of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Smartphone and Ecological Momentary Assessment Study (2020, unknown): “An initial study in which EMAs from 80 undergraduate students were used to investigate the influence of COVID-19 on mental health and social contact found increased mental health problems but no change in social contact [9].”