Did Social Connection Decline During the First Wave of COVID-19?: The Role of Extraversion

By D. Folk, Karynna Okabe‐Miyamoto, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Sonja Lyubomirsky. Collabra: Psychology, 2020

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In two pre-registered studies, we tracked changes in individuals’ feelings of social connection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both studies capitalized on measures of social connection and well-being obtained prior to the COVID-19 pandemic by recruiting the same participants again in the midst of the pandemic’s upending effects. Study 1 included a sample of undergraduates from a Canadian university (N = 467), and Study 2 included community adults primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom (N = 336). Our results suggest that people experienced relatively little change in feelings of social connection in the face of the initial reshaping of their social lives caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploratory analyses suggested that relatively extraverted individuals exhibited larger declines in social connection. However, after controlling for levels of social connection prior to the pandemic (as pre-registered), the negative effect of extraversion reversed (Study 1) or disappeared (Study 2).

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0277b50224af6a077819ab73dee189793cec1f3

Citations in the corpus

• Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Big Five Personality on Subjective and Psychological Well-Being (2020, unknown): “Third, it provides the first, to our knowledge, comprehensive assessment of whether the pandemic moderated the effect of personality on well-being (although, see also Folk et al., 2020).”