essay on my experience during covid 19 lockdown

COVID-19 Lockdown: My Experience

When the lockdown started, I was ecstatic. My final year of school had finished early, exams were cancelled, the sun was shining. I was happy, and confident I would be OK. After all, how hard could staying at home possibly be? After a while, the reality of the situation started to sink in.

The novelty of being at home wore off and I started to struggle. I suffered from regular panic attacks, frozen on the floor in my room, unable to move or speak. I had nightmares most nights, and struggled to sleep. It was as if I was stuck, trapped in my house and in my own head. I didn't know how to cope.

However, over time, I found ways to deal with the pressure. I realised that lockdown gave me more time to the things I loved, hobbies that had been previously swamped by schoolwork. I started baking, drawing and writing again, and felt free for the first time in months. I had forgotten how good it felt to be creative. I started spending more time with my family. I hadn't realised how much I had missed them.

Almost a month later, I feel so much better. I understand how difficult this must be, but it's important to remember that none of us is alone. No matter how scared, or trapped, or alone you feel, things can only get better.  Take time to revisit the things you love, and remember that all of this will eventually pass. All we can do right now is stay at home, look after ourselves and our loved ones, and look forward to a better future.

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Covid 19 — My Experience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

My Experience During The Covid-19 Pandemic

• Categories: Covid 19

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Words: 440 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 440 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, physical impact, mental and emotional impact, social impact.

• World Health Organization. (2021). Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard. https://covid19.who.int/
• American Psychiatric Association. (2020). Mental health and COVID-19. https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/apa-blogs/apa-blog/2020/03/mental-health-and-covid-19
• The New York Times. (2020). Coping with Coronavirus Anxiety. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/well/family/coronavirus-anxiety-mental-health.html

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

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The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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Whether you’ve suffered in the past year or been lucky enough to escape the worst of it, we would like to hear your stories about the pandemic

The pandemic has been a difficult, dramatic time for so many of us, for so many different reasons. We have lost loved ones, had our families torn apart, struggled financially and emotionally. Some of us have been stressed by overwork; others by sudden unemployment. We have had to shield from the outside world – or been reluctantly obliged to mix with it.

If you have a story to share we would love to hear from you. You might be a doctor working flat out in A&E, a student who was locked down at university, a key worker forced to serve the public with inadequate PPE, a single mother who had to go months without childcare, a son who couldn’t visit his dying father in the care home … or even one of the lucky ones who has come out of the past year feeling stronger and more optimistic about life.

For a special feature, we’re aiming to put readers in touch with each other, to talk about their experiences and insights.

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MY COVID-19 Story: how young people overcome the covid-19 crisis

As part of UNESCO’s initiative “MY COVID-19 Story”,  young people have been invited to tell their stories and experiences: how they feel, how they act, what makes them feel worried and what future they envision, how the crisis has affected their lives, the challenges they face, new opportunities being explored, and their hopes for the future. This campaign was launched in April as part of UNESCO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to give the floor to young people worldwide, share their views and amplify their voices. While the world grapples with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, many young people are taking on new roles, demonstrating leadership in their countries and communities, and sharing creative ideas and solutions. To this day, UNESCO has already received more than 150 written testimonials.

Self-isolation can be a difficult time… However, many young people worldwide decided to tackle this with productivity and positivity. Monty (17), a secondary school student from the United Kingdom, is developing new digital skills and has created his own mini radio station. Lockdown helped Öykü (25), a young filmmaker from Turkey, to concentrate on her creative projects. And for Joseph (30), a teacher from Nigeria, this time is a way to open up to lots of learning opportunities through webinars.

The crisis has changed not only the daily routine, but also perceptions of everyday life. For some young people rethinking the value of time and common moral principles appears to be key. 

“The biggest lesson for me is understanding … [the value of] time. During these last months I made more use of my time than in a past year.” - shares young tech entrepreneur Barbara (21), from Russia. Ravikumar (24), a civil engineer from India, believes  “This crisis makes us socialize more than ever. We are eating together, sharing our thoughts and playing together which happened rarely within my family before.”

Beyond the crisis

After massive upheavals in the lives of many people, the future for young people seems to be both a promising perspective to seize some new emerging opportunities, and a time filled with uncertainty about the crisis consequences and the future world order.

“It is giving us an opportunity to look into how we need to better support our vulnerable populations, in terms of food and educational resources”, says Anusha (19), from the United States of America. For Mahmoud (22), from Egypt, the COVID-19 crisis is a call to action: “After the pandemic, I will put a lot of efforts into helping people who have been affected by COVID-19. I am planning to improve their health by providing sports sessions, highlighting the importance of a healthy lifestyle.”

The COVID-19 pandemic brings uncertainty and instability to young people across the world, making them feel worried about this new reality they’re living in and presenting several new challenges every day, as they find themselves at the front line of the crisis. That is why, more than ever, we need to put the spotlight on young women and men and let their voice be heard! 

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Join the  “MY COVID-19 Story” campaign! Tell us your story!

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Lockdown diaries: the everyday voices of the coronavirus pandemic

Senior Lecturer in Social Science, Swansea University

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Michael Ward does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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A diary is by its very nature an intensely personal thing. It’s a place to record our most intimate thoughts and worries about the world around us. In other words, it is a glimpse at our state of mind.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic, and the impact of the lockdown, have left many people isolated and scared about what the future might bring. As a sociologist, I was keen to hear how people were experiencing this totally new way of life. So in early March I began the CoronaDiaries – a sociological study which aimed to highlight the real voices and the everyday experiences of the pandemic by collecting the accounts of people up and down the UK, before, during and after the crisis.

From the frontline health worker concerned about PPE and exposure to COVID-19, to the furloughed engineer worried about his mental health, these are the voices of the pandemic. Entries take a variety of forms, such as handwritten or word-processed diaries, blogs, social media posts, photos, videos, memes and other submissions like songs, poems, shopping lists, dream logs and artwork. So far, the study has recruited 164 participants, from 12 countries, aged between 11 and 87. These people come from a range of backgrounds.

This article is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

When I began this project in March, I did not expect the study to prove so popular. I have been studying and working as a sociologist for nearly 20 years and most of my research so far has looked at how young men experience education, gender roles and social inequality.

Like many of us, I was wondering how I could be of use at this time, do my bit in the crisis and make the most of my skills. As the weeks have gone by and more and more people have signed up, I’ve realised this project isn’t just a research study to understand how society is being made and remade – it is also providing hope and acting as a cathartic coping tool for people. While some of the documents have made me cry, especially those from already vulnerable people, others have made me laugh and have been a joy to read. I feel as though I am on a journey with the participants as we move through the crisis.

Reading the entries, what becomes clear as the lockdown is eased is that this pandemic has been – and will continue to be – experienced in very different ways across society. For some, the crisis has been an opportunity, but for others, who are already in a disadvantaged position, it is a very frightening experience.

March – first days

The frontline health worker

Emma is in her late 30s, and a frontline health worker in a rural location in Wales. Like many key workers, Emma is also juggling family life and caring responsibilities. In a diary entry written in mid-march, Emma foresaw issues with PPE in the NHS.

On my shifts over the previous weekend, it became apparent how unprepared we are. I was working on a ‘clean’ ward and four of the patients were found to potentially be infected. There were no clinical indications they were potentially infected on admission and had been nursed without PPE for two days. We may have all been exposed, as these patients are suspected to have COVID-19. We have been given bare bones PPE. It was quite sobering when a rapid response was called and the doctors refused to enter the cubicle without FFP3 masks , blue gown and visor.

Emma said the equipment “magically turned up” after the doctors took this stand but said the sight of them all in surgical gowns, helmets and visors “did verge on the ridiculous”. She added:

I did find it amusing – we’re looking at the doctors wanting their protection and they are looking at the consultant wanting his! It did feel like a farce. Fortunately, the patient was made stable and went to surgery for another issue. But the whole episode was worrying, particularly the crappy surgical mask and aprons we are provided. It’s also galling that they have told staff there is no PPE when clearly there is. Can’t help but think a lack of information is creating fear amongst staff. It’s also weird they aren’t testing staff unless they’re symptomatic. This is crazy when they are so dependent on bank and agency workers who move around.

The worried mum

Beth, 35, is a mother of two young children who lives in a busy city. In the early days of the crisis, she hid her fears from her children. Here is a snapshot from her written diary:

I didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t help I watched the news before going to sleep. Then looked at my phone and full of corona news … Today was the big announcement from Boris (Friday, March 20) ‘to stay in’! Even though he had been saying this all week, the tone and manner of the broadcast was so scary and serious. I felt scared for my family and it just made me fearful of what is to come. I rang my mum straight away … [she] could hear my fear. After a good chat … my mum … remind[ed] me ‘we are all well at this moment’ and to focus on that. My daughter cried later that evening. I said, ‘what are you scared of’ to which she replied, ‘I’m not sure mummy, I don’t know what I am scared of.’ Which made me realise that I need to be brave and make sure that both kids are reassured. Later that evening, I felt tearful and just feeling overwhelmed by the whole situation. How stupid too, because we are all safe.

Read more: How to help with school at home: don't talk like a teacher

The student

Audrey, 21, goes to a university in Birmingham and is in the final months of her degree. The rupture of “normal” student life became clear when the full scale of the lockdown came into force, causing her housemates to leave their shared house.

I’d just lost all three of my housemates, who’d returned to Barbados, Spain and France – literally one day after each other. My landlord really kindly agreed that my sister could stay with me – and she won’t even charge any rent. I almost cried when I got that message. I was having a facetime with my friend, where we paused to watch Boris Johnson’s speech (March 23). It was so scary because we were effectively in lockdown. I had told my sister that I thought it was about to happen earlier in the day, she didn’t believe me – and then unfortunately it came true! I told her to jump on the train from Manchester.

Audrey went on to write how some of her fellow students set up a food bank in one of the student accommodations near her and that she is determined help where she can. But despite her altruistic efforts, the lockdown was still taking its toll.

I feel deflated from everything. I chatted to a friend over Messenger and she suggested I paint something. I painted this rainbow and felt so much better at the end. I added in my favourite quote that gets [me] through any hard times and stuck it on the window.

April – settling in

The cleaner

Eva is a self-employed cleaner, in her mid 50s, who lives in South Wales with her husband, John, who works in a factory making hand sanitiser. As the lockdown entered its second month, she reflected on her relationship with the woman who worked for her and how differently the pandemic was effecting them both.

Today I am cleaning the community centre, which since the lockdown, is running as a food bank three days a week … I bleach everything, door handles, floors, everything. Most staff work from home at the moment so we are going in the morning until all this is over. I’m glad I’m still in business for Beverly, who works with me, as much as anything. I’m her only income, but if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. We have a cigarette break outside and I remind Beverly to stay apart. ‘What, beans for brekkie, was it?’ I laugh. Beverly really doesn’t care about COVID – like many others I meet, who believe if they get it, they get it.

For once I’m glad I’m a worrier, plus I’m not ready to die yet. We are out of there early as no staff equals less mess. I break it to Beverly that I can’t give her a lift home for now. Last week I made her sit in the back [of the car] which felt faintly ridiculous, but John advised even that’s too close. Beverly shrugs and says that’s fine. Her son died unexpectedly two years ago and now she accepts hardship with ease. I feel bad as her life really is crap and now she has to walk two miles home.

The teacher

Sophia is a teacher in her 40s and based in the south of England. She is trying to home school her children during the lockdown and being a parent and a teacher is proving challenging.

We began the day slightly differently with an online PE lesson from someone called Joe Wicks, or The Body Coach. He’s been really popular during the lockdown and a few of my friends recommended the 30-minute workout session he does every day at 9am, so I thought we’d give it a go! Unfortunately, my two have the concentration spans of goldfish so it didn’t go according to plan! My son ended up lying upside down, with his legs on a chair and his head on the floor and my daughter said he moved too fast, before promptly falling on her behind! The only problem with changing the routine was that we were then 30 minutes late for home school and my son does not cope well with change. He needs quite a rigid structure, with clearly defined timings and any changes can be detrimental. The speed of the school lockdown was particularly challenging: school gives his day structure and taking it away so abruptly was very difficult for him.

The civil servant

Sarah is a civil servant in her mid-60s working in a pivotal role for HM Revenue and Customs. She used her diary to document the rapid changes which have taken place in her organisation since the lockdown and how working from home was becoming “normal” from March 23.

My department is changing so quickly – we have introduced a new i-form to promote more ‘web chat’. This is proving popular with the public. We are trialling taking incoming telephone calls at home. We are all now working from home when we can, no more car sharing, unless it’s with someone you live with – we must keep two metres apart. I am beginning to accept that this is a crisis, once in a generation, completely alien to us. Will life in the future be remembered as ‘before and after’ COVID-19? For the first time in many years I feel so proud to work where I do…I understand, possibly for the first time, why we are ‘key workers’. We have a letter as proof to show the police if we are ever stopped whilst travelling into work and NCP carparks are free for us to use if we come into work! No better validation than that!

The furloughed engineer

Lucas, a man in his late 30s from Northern Ireland, is finding the pandemic difficult on multiple levels. It’s a trigger for his mental health, but also it is a reminder of past troubles.

Nightmare. Anxiety, fear, dread, no way to burn off the angst, worry upon worry, like how the inside of my head can be at times. Then there’s the ones that are really in the middle of it, nurses dying because there was no proper PPE at the right time, people losing parents, friends, and IMHO worst of all, kids.

Lucas writes about how he stopped watching the news because in an attempt to “avoid anxiety”. He adds:

I grew up in Northern Ireland during ‘the troubles’ and it was totally normal for me to watch the news every night at tea time [6pm] and hear of various paramilitary groups killing people. That was 100% normal to me. Looking back watching the news in those times did me no good. Sure, I know some facts about it all, but do I feel any better for it … Same as now, I’m going to try to ride this out with my hands over my ears and my head in the sand at times.

Read more: Coronavirus: a growing number of people are avoiding news

The academic

Jack, 72, is a retired academic who used his diary to comment on societal problems. One of which is the narrative of what the “new normal” is and how society is being remade.

April 29 saw the return of Boris, who was to ‘take control of the problem’. An almost religious return for someone who came back from being nearly dead on Easter Sunday! It seems we are being told to be ready for the new normal which again raises the issue of what post-lockdown will be like. On the web I don’t see sociologists rushing in to think about this new normal! A Google search suggests that the new normal is being constructed largely by those in business and is largely focused on the new normal being a more exaggerated (and better?) version of the old normal – more globalisation, more focus on customers and so on. There is little ‘thinking outside the box’.

Read more: What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures

May – Looking forward

The bell-ringer

Daniel, a man in his mid-20s, had just started a new relationship in February with a woman he met while bell-ringing at a church in the Midlands. However, both he and his girlfriend live apart and have not seen each other since the lockdown began. Over the past few months, Daniel has found this a challenge, but has documented how their relationship has been maintained virtually and through the help of keeping a diary.

Suzy and I have got to know each other a lot quicker and a lot better than what we may have done otherwise, and whilst we do miss each other immensely, it’ll make the good times so much better when we do see each other next. Whenever and however we get out of this, I am determined that I will have made the most of these extraordinary circumstances.

This is just a glimpse of the stories that have been gathered by the CoronaDiaries project, but already patterns are emerging. While this crisis is undoubtedly impacting on people across the globe, what is clear from these accounts is that there are multiple crises across everyday life – for the young, the old, for mothers and for fathers and for those from different class, gender and ethnic backgrounds. These entries are able to highlight the multiple different lives behind the dreaded numbers we hear announced each day.

My diarists have been recording how they feel vulnerable and uncertain about their future – but there is also hope that things will not be like this forever.

The evidence which is being gathered here can play an important part in addressing the social, political and economic changes created by the COVID-19 pandemic. This type of analysis will foster global awareness of crucial issues that can help support specific public health responses to better control future outbreaks and to better prepare people for future problems. The study will run until September and all accounts will then be available to view in a free digital online archive.

All the names used in this piece have been changed at the request of the study participants.

For you: more from our Insights series :

Lockdown lessons from the history of solitude

What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures

The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worst

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter .

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How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

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Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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Seven short essays about life during the pandemic

The boston book festival's at home community writing project invites area residents to describe their experiences during this unprecedented time..

My alarm sounds at 8:15 a.m. I open my eyes and take a deep breath. I wiggle my toes and move my legs. I do this religiously every morning. Today, marks day 74 of staying at home.

My mornings are filled with reading biblical scripture, meditation, breathing in the scents of a hanging eucalyptus branch in the shower, and making tea before I log into my computer to work. After an hour-and-a-half Zoom meeting, I decided to take a long walk to the post office and grab a fresh bouquet of burnt orange ranunculus flowers. I embrace the warm sun beaming on my face. I feel joy. I feel at peace.

I enter my apartment and excessively wash my hands and face. I pour a glass of iced kombucha. I sit at my table and look at the text message on my phone. My coworker writes that she is thinking of me during this difficult time. She must be referring to the Amy Cooper incident. I learn shortly that she is not.

I Google Minneapolis and see his name: George Floyd. And just like that a simple and beautiful day transitions into a day of sorrow.

Nakia Hill, Boston

It was a wobbly, yet solemn little procession: three masked mourners and a canine. Beginning in Kenmore Square, at David and Sue Horner’s condo, it proceeded up Commonwealth Avenue Mall.

S. Sue Horner died on Good Friday, April 10, in the Year of the Virus. Sue did not die of the virus but her parting was hemmed by it: no gatherings to mark the passing of this splendid human being.

David devised a send-off nevertheless. On April 23rd, accompanied by his daughter and son-in-law, he set out for Old South Church. David led, bearing the urn. His daughter came next, holding her phone aloft, speaker on, through which her brother in Illinois played the bagpipes for the length of the procession, its soaring thrum infusing the Mall. Her husband came last with Melon, their golden retriever.

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I unlocked the empty church and led the procession into the columbarium. David drew the urn from its velvet cover, revealing a golden vessel inset with incandescent tiles. We lifted the urn into the niche, prayed, recited Psalm 23, and shared some words.

It was far too small for the luminous “Dr. Sue”, but what we could manage in the Year of the Virus.

Nancy S. Taylor, Boston

On April 26, 2020, our household was a bustling home for four people. Our two sons, ages 18 and 22, have a lot of energy. We are among the lucky ones. I can work remotely. Our food and shelter are not at risk.

As I write this a week later, it is much quieter here.

On April 27, our older son, an EMT, transported a COVID-19 patient to the ER. He left home to protect my delicate health and became ill with the virus a week later.

On April 29, my husband’s 95-year-old father had a stroke. My husband left immediately to be with his 90-year-old mother near New York City and is now preparing for his father’s discharge from the hospital. Rehab people will come to the house; going to a facility would be too dangerous.

My husband just called me to describe today’s hospital visit. The doctors had warned that although his father had regained the ability to speak, he could only repeat what was said to him.

“It’s me,” said my husband.

“It’s me,” said my father-in-law.

“I love you,” said my husband.

“I love you,” said my father-in-law.

“Sooooooooo much,” said my father-in-law.

Lucia Thompson, Wayland

Would racism exist if we were blind?

I felt his eyes bore into me as I walked through the grocery store. At first, I thought nothing of it. With the angst in the air attributable to COVID, I understood the anxiety-provoking nature of feeling as though your 6-foot bubble had burst. So, I ignored him and maintained my distance. But he persisted, glaring at my face, squinting to see who I was underneath the mask. This time I looked back, when he yelled, in my mother tongue, for me to go back to my country.

In shock, I just laughed. How could he tell what I was under my mask? Or see anything through the sunglasses he was wearing inside? It baffled me. I laughed at the irony that he would use my own language against me, that he knew enough to guess where I was from in some version of culturally competent racism. I laughed because dealing with the truth behind that comment generated a sadness in me that was too much to handle. If not now, then when will we be together?

So I ask again, would racism exist if we were blind?

Faizah Shareef, Boston

My Family is “Out” There

But I am “in” here. Life is different now “in” Assisted Living since the deadly COVID-19 arrived. Now the staff, employees, and all 100 residents have our temperatures taken daily. Everyone else, including my family, is “out” there. People like the hairdresser are really missed — with long straight hair and masks, we don’t even recognize ourselves.

Since mid-March we are in quarantine “in” our rooms with meals served. Activities are practically non-existent. We can sit on the back patio 6 feet apart, wearing masks, do exercises there, chat, and walk nearby. Nothing inside. Hopefully June will improve.

My family is “out” there — somewhere! Most are working from home (or Montana). Hopefully an August wedding will happen, but unfortunately, I may still be “in” here.

From my window I wave to my son “out” there. Recently, when my daughter visited, I opened the window “in” my second-floor room and could see and hear her perfectly “out” there. Next time she will bring a chair so we can have an “in” and “out” conversation all day, or until we run out of words.

Barbara Anderson, Raynham

My boyfriend Marcial lives in Boston, and I live in New York City. We had been doing the long-distance thing pretty successfully until coronavirus hit. In mid-March, I was furloughed from my temp job, Marcial began working remotely, and New York started shutting down. I went to Boston to stay with Marcial.

We are opposites in many ways, but we share a love of food. The kitchen has been the center of quarantine life —and also quarantine problems.

Marcial and I have gone from eating out and cooking/grocery shopping for each other during our periodic visits to cooking/grocery shopping with each other all the time. We’ve argued over things like the proper way to make rice and what greens to buy for salad. Our habits are deeply rooted in our upbringing and individual cultures (Filipino immigrant and American-born Chinese, hence the strong rice opinions).

On top of the mundane issues, we’ve also dealt with a flooded kitchen (resulting in cockroaches) and a mandoline accident leading to an ER visit. Marcial and I have spent quarantine navigating how to handle the unexpected and how to integrate our lifestyles. We’ve been eating well along the way.

Melissa Lee, Waltham

It’s 3 a.m. and my dog Rikki just gave me a worried look. Up again?

“I can’t sleep,” I say. I flick the light, pick up “Non-Zero Probabilities.” But the words lay pinned to the page like swatted flies. I watch new “Killing Eve” episodes, play old Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats songs. Still night.

We are — what? — 12 agitated weeks into lockdown, and now this. The thing that got me was Chauvin’s sunglasses. Perched nonchalantly on his head, undisturbed, as if he were at a backyard BBQ. Or anywhere other than kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, on his life. And Floyd was a father, as we all now know, having seen his daughter Gianna on Stephen Jackson’s shoulders saying “Daddy changed the world.”

Precious child. I pray, safeguard her.

Rikki has her own bed. But she won’t leave me. A Goddess of Protection. She does that thing dogs do, hovers increasingly closely the more agitated I get. “I’m losing it,” I say. I know. And like those weighted gravity blankets meant to encourage sleep, she drapes her 70 pounds over me, covering my restless heart with safety.

As if daybreak, or a prayer, could bring peace today.

Kirstan Barnett, Watertown

Until June 30, send your essay (200 words or less) about life during COVID-19 via bostonbookfest.org . Some essays will be published on the festival’s blog and some will appear in The Boston Globe.

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Coronavirus: My Experience During the Pandemic

Anastasiya Kandratsenka George Washington High School, Class of 2021

At this point in time there shouldn't be a single person who doesn't know about the coronavirus, or as they call it, COVID-19. The coronavirus is a virus that originated in China, reached the U.S. and eventually spread all over the world by January of 2020. The common symptoms of the virus include shortness of breath, chills, sore throat, headache, loss of taste and smell, runny nose, vomiting and nausea. As it has been established, it might take up to 14 days for the symptoms to show. On top of that, the virus is also highly contagious putting all age groups at risk. The elderly and individuals with chronic diseases such as pneumonia or heart disease are in the top risk as the virus attacks the immune system. 

The virus first appeared on the news and media platforms in the month of January of this year. The United States and many other countries all over the globe saw no reason to panic as it seemed that the virus presented no possible threat. Throughout the next upcoming months, the virus began to spread very quickly, alerting health officials not only in the U.S., but all over the world. As people started digging into the origin of the virus, it became clear that it originated in China. Based on everything scientists have looked at, the virus came from a bat that later infected other animals, making it way to humans. As it goes for the United States, the numbers started rising quickly, resulting in the cancellation of sports events, concerts, large gatherings and then later on schools. 

As it goes personally for me, my school was shut down on March 13th. The original plan was to put us on a two weeks leave, returning on March 30th but, as the virus spread rapidly and things began escalating out of control very quickly, President Trump announced a state of emergency and the whole country was put on quarantine until April 30th. At that point, schools were officially shut down for the rest of the school year. Distanced learning was introduced, online classes were established, a new norm was put in place. As for the School District of Philadelphia distanced learning and online classes began on May 4th. From that point on I would have classes four times a week, from 8AM till 3PM. Virtual learning was something that I never had to experience and encounter before. It was all new and different for me, just as it was for millions of students all over the United States. We were forced to transfer from physically attending school, interacting with our peers and teachers, participating in fun school events and just being in a classroom setting, to just looking at each other through a computer screen in a number of days. That is something that we all could have never seen coming, it was all so sudden and new. 

My experience with distanced learning was not very great. I get distracted very easily and   find it hard to concentrate, especially when it comes to school. In a classroom I was able to give my full attention to what was being taught, I was all there. However, when we had the online classes, I could not focus and listen to what my teachers were trying to get across. I got distracted very easily, missing out on important information that was being presented. My entire family which consists of five members, were all home during the quarantine. I have two little siblings who are very loud and demanding, so I’m sure it can be imagined how hard it was for me to concentrate on school and do what was asked of me when I had these two running around the house. On top of school, I also had to find a job and work 35 hours a week to support my family during the pandemic. My mother lost her job for the time being and my father was only able to work from home. As we have a big family, the income of my father was not enough. I made it my duty to help out and support our family as much as I could: I got a job at a local supermarket and worked there as a cashier for over two months. 

While I worked at the supermarket, I was exposed to dozens of people every day and with all the protection that was implemented to protect the customers and the workers, I was lucky enough to not get the virus. As I say that, my grandparents who do not even live in the U.S. were not so lucky. They got the virus and spent over a month isolated, in a hospital bed, with no one by their side. Our only way of communicating was through the phone and if lucky, we got to talk once a week. Speaking for my family, that was the worst and scariest part of the whole situation. Luckily for us, they were both able to recover completely. 

As the pandemic is somewhat under control, the spread of the virus has slowed down. We’re now living in the new norm. We no longer view things the same, the way we did before. Large gatherings and activities that require large groups to come together are now unimaginable! Distanced learning is what we know, not to mention the importance of social distancing and having to wear masks anywhere and everywhere we go. This is the new norm now and who knows when and if ever we’ll be able go back to what we knew before. This whole experience has made me realize that we, as humans, tend to take things for granted and don’t value what we have until it is taken away from us. 

Articles in this Volume

[tid]: dedication, [tid]: new tools for a new house: transformations for justice and peace in and beyond covid-19, [tid]: black lives matter, intersectionality, and lgbtq rights now, [tid]: the voice of asian american youth: what goes untold, [tid]: beyond words: reimagining education through art and activism, [tid]: voice(s) of a black man, [tid]: embodied learning and community resilience, [tid]: re-imagining professional learning in a time of social isolation: storytelling as a tool for healing and professional growth, [tid]: reckoning: what does it mean to look forward and back together as critical educators, [tid]: leader to leaders: an indigenous school leader’s advice through storytelling about grief and covid-19, [tid]: finding hope, healing and liberation beyond covid-19 within a context of captivity and carcerality, [tid]: flux leadership: leading for justice and peace in & beyond covid-19, [tid]: flux leadership: insights from the (virtual) field, [tid]: hard pivot: compulsory crisis leadership emerges from a space of doubt, [tid]: and how are the children, [tid]: real talk: teaching and leading while bipoc, [tid]: systems of emotional support for educators in crisis, [tid]: listening leadership: the student voices project, [tid]: global engagement, perspective-sharing, & future-seeing in & beyond a global crisis, [tid]: teaching and leadership during covid-19: lessons from lived experiences, [tid]: crisis leadership in independent schools - styles & literacies, [tid]: rituals, routines and relationships: high school athletes and coaches in flux, [tid]: superintendent back-to-school welcome 2020, [tid]: mitigating summer learning loss in philadelphia during covid-19: humble attempts from the field, [tid]: untitled, [tid]: the revolution will not be on linkedin: student activism and neoliberalism, [tid]: why radical self-care cannot wait: strategies for black women leaders now, [tid]: from emergency response to critical transformation: online learning in a time of flux, [tid]: illness methodology for and beyond the covid era, [tid]: surviving black girl magic, the work, and the dissertation, [tid]: cancelled: the old student experience, [tid]: lessons from liberia: integrating theatre for development and youth development in uncertain times, [tid]: designing a more accessible future: learning from covid-19, [tid]: the construct of standards-based education, [tid]: teachers leading teachers to prepare for back to school during covid, [tid]: using empathy to cross the sea of humanity, [tid]: (un)doing college, community, and relationships in the time of coronavirus, [tid]: have we learned nothing, [tid]: choosing growth amidst chaos, [tid]: living freire in pandemic….participatory action research and democratizing knowledge at knowledgedemocracy.org, [tid]: philly students speak: voices of learning in pandemics, [tid]: the power of will: a letter to my descendant, [tid]: photo essays with students, [tid]: unity during a global pandemic: how the fight for racial justice made us unite against two diseases, [tid]: educational changes caused by the pandemic and other related social issues, [tid]: online learning during difficult times, [tid]: fighting crisis: a student perspective, [tid]: the destruction of soil rooted with culture, [tid]: a demand for change, [tid]: education through experience in and beyond the pandemics, [tid]: the pandemic diaries, [tid]: all for one and 4 for $4, [tid]: tiktok activism, [tid]: why digital learning may be the best option for next year, [tid]: my 2020 teen experience, [tid]: living between two pandemics, [tid]: journaling during isolation: the gold standard of coronavirus, [tid]: sailing through uncertainty, [tid]: what i wish my teachers knew, [tid]: youthing in pandemic while black, [tid]: the pain inflicted by indifference, [tid]: education during the pandemic, [tid]: the good, the bad, and the year 2020, [tid]: racism fueled pandemic, [tid]: coronavirus: my experience during the pandemic, [tid]: the desensitization of a doomed generation, [tid]: a philadelphia war-zone, [tid]: the attack of the covid monster, [tid]: back-to-school: covid-19 edition, [tid]: the unexpected war, [tid]: learning outside of the classroom, [tid]: why we should learn about college financial aid in school: a student perspective, [tid]: flying the plane as we go: building the future through a haze, [tid]: my covid experience in the age of technology, [tid]: we, i, and they, [tid]: learning your a, b, cs during a pandemic, [tid]: quarantine: a musical, [tid]: what it’s like being a high school student in 2020, [tid]: everything happens for a reason, [tid]: blacks live matter – a sobering and empowering reality among my peers, [tid]: the mental health of a junior during covid-19 outbreaks, [tid]: a year of change, [tid]: covid-19 and school, [tid]: the virtues and vices of virtual learning, [tid]: college decisions and the year 2020: a virtual rollercoaster, [tid]: quarantine thoughts, [tid]: quarantine through generation z, [tid]: attending online school during a pandemic.

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• PMC7927208.1 ; 2020 Oct 2
• ➤ PMC7927208.2; 2021 Feb 26

Experiences of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic: descriptive findings from a survey of families in the Born in Bradford study

Josie dickerson.

1 Bradford Institute for Health Research, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Bradford Royal Infirmary, Duckworth Lane, Bradford, BD9 6RJ, UK

Brian Kelly

Bridget lockyer, sally bridges, christopher cartwright, kathryn willan, kirsty crossley, maria bryant.

2 Hull York Medical School, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK

3 Department of Health Sciences, University of York, Seebohm Rowntree Building, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK

Trevor A. Sheldon

4 Institute of Population Health Sciences, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London, Yvonne Carter Building, 58 Turner Street, London, E1 2AB, UK

Deborah A. Lawlor

5 MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, University of Bristol, Oakfield House, Oakfield Grove, Bristol, BS8 2BN, UK

6 Population Health Science, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 2BN, UK

7 Bristol National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 2BN, UK

John Wright

Rosemary r c mceachan, kate e. pickett, associated data, underlying data.

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• Before you contact BiB, please make sure you have read our Guidance for Collaborators . Our BiB executive review proposals on a monthly basis and we will endeavor to respond to your request as soon as possible. You can find out about the different datasets which are available here . If you are unsure if we have the data that you need please contact a member of the BiB team ( [email protected] ).
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Extended data

Harvard Dataverse: Extended data for this paper: Experiences of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic: descriptive findings from a survey of families in the Born in Bradford study. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BS28KA 15 .

This project contains the following extended data:

• - Supplementary Tables 1–12.doc
• - COVID_BiBAndBiBBSFamilyQuestionnaire_v1.pdf

Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero "No rights reserved" data waiver (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication).

Version Changes

Revised. amendments from version 1.

From the helpful suggestions from reviewers we have reframed the paper using the now clearly stated hypothesis: that health inequalities are likely to have worsened during the pandemic and we intend to look at differential impacts based on ethnicity and current financial insecurity. We have clarified the intentions of the wider programme of research in the introduction to set this paper in context. Namely that this paper reports the participant characteristics and the immediate health, social and economic status (by ethnicity and financial insecurity) during the first  survey of BiB parents undertaken during April – June 2020. One of our underlying aims of this paper was to make our Covid-19 survey findings widely available to researchers and policy makers as quickly as possible. However, future plans are in place to use longitudinal data from before the pandemic, and from future surveys during the pandemic, to describe the trajectories, and identify the long-term consequences, of the pandemic on vulnerable populations. In the results section the majority of the detailed tables are now supplementary tables, and we have used figures in the paper to more easily summarise and describe the data. Similarly, the results are now directly linked to our hypothesis and focus on differential impacts for ethnic minorities and those experiencing current financial insecurity. Other associations are then described where relevant. In the discussion we have further elaborated on the strengths / limitations section, and added in more about future research questions. We have made the addition of Maria Bryant as an author as she has contributed significantly to the re-drafting of this paper, and was already a key member of the wider Scientific Advisory Group who had contributed to the research.

Peer Review Summary

Background : Lockdown measures implemented to contain the Covid-19 virus have increased health inequalities, with families from deprived and ethnically diverse backgrounds most likely to be adversely affected. This paper describes the experiences of families living in the multi-ethnic and deprived city of Bradford, England.

Methods : A wave of survey data collection using a combination of email, text and phone with postal follow-up during the first Covid-19 UK lockdown (10th April to 30 th June 2020) with parents participating in two longitudinal studies. Cross tabulations explored variation by ethnicity and financial insecurity. Text from open questions was analysed using thematic analysis.

Results : Of 7,652 families invited, 2,144 (28%) participated. The results presented are based on the 2,043 (95%) mothers’ responses: 957 (47%) of whom were of Pakistani heritage, 715 (35%) White British and 356 (18%) other ethnicity 971 (46%) lived in the most deprived decile of material deprivation in England. and 738 (37%) were financially insecure.

Many families lived in poor quality (N=574, 28%), overcrowded (N=364, 19%) housing. Food (N=396, 20%), employment (N=728, 37%) and housing (N=204, 10%) insecurities were common, particularly in those who were furloughed, self-employed not working or unemployed. Clinically important depression and anxiety were reported by 372 (19%) and 318 (16%) mothers. Ethnic minority and financially insecure families had a worse experience during the lockdown across all domains, with the exception of mental health which appeared worse in White British mothers.  Open text responses corroborated these findings and highlighted high levels of anxiety and fear about Covid-19.

Conclusions : There is a need for policy makers and commissioners to better support vulnerable families during and after the pandemic. Future work will use longitudinal data from before the pandemic, and from future surveys during the pandemic, to describe trajectories and the long-term consequences of the pandemic on vulnerable populations.

Introduction

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK government, like many others internationally, has implemented stringent lockdowns to stop the spread of the virus 1 . In the first UK lockdown, implemented from March 23 rd 2020, this included the closure of all schools, non-essential shops and businesses, reduced health and social care provision and restrictions on daily activities, with the aim of limiting the number of deaths, severe Covid-19 cases and consequent pressures on the National Health Service (NHS) 2 . There is a growing recognition that the measures have had a negative impact on mental health 3 , 4 and economic insecurity 5 , 6 , with the greatest impact most likely to be on those in society who are already vulnerable 7 – 9 .

The Born in Bradford (BiB) research programme has been following the health and wellbeing of over 36,000 Bradford residents since 2007. Bradford is the fifth largest metropolitan district in England, situated in the North of England and has a young, ethnically diverse population with high levels of deprivation and health inequalities 10 . BiB is host to three family cohort studies, two of which had collected in-depth information on the demographics of participants prior to the pandemic, as well as consent to contact participants for new research studies 11 – 13 . We were therefore in a unique position to be able to study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown response on families with pre-school, primary and/or secondary school aged children living in a highly deprived and ethnically diverse city.

This research infrastructure is being harnessed as part of a mixed-methods, longitudinal adaptive research study to provide actionable intelligence to local decision makers about how best to minimise health inequalities and aid the City’s recovery. This includes plans to use longitudinal data from before the pandemic, and from future surveys during the pandemic, to describe the trajectories, and identify the long-term consequences, of the pandemic on vulnerable populations. Our approach can be read in more detail here 10 .

This paper reports the participant characteristics and the immediate health, social and economic status, by ethnicity and financial insecurity, during the first survey of BiB parents undertaken during April – June 2020.

The main objectives of this initial analysis were:

• To explore differential impacts of the first UK Covid-19 lockdown, by ethnicity and current financial insecurity, on living circumstances, including food, employment and housing insecurity, and the physical and mental health of parents.

• To explore responses to open-ended questions about worries, challenges and any positive experiences during lockdown, in order to corroborate the survey findings and identify any other areas of concern.

• To inform areas of interest, including health and socioeconomic issues, for repeated longitudinal waves of data collection throughout the pandemic.

• To identify research questions for further in-depth quantitative analysis using pre-Covid-19 baseline data from these longitudinal studies.

Study design

Adult participants from two prospective birth cohort studies were asked to complete a survey of their experiences during the first full lockdown response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was implemented from 23 March 2020.

Study population

1. Born in Bradford Growing Up (BiBGU) (N= 5,154, 2017–2020). Sample: Parents with an index child aged 9–13 11 , 12 .

2. Born in Bradford’s Better Start (BiBBS) (N=2,665, 2016–2019). Sample: Parents with an index child aged 0–4 13 .

Mode of delivery and data collection

We used multiple methods - a combination of emails, text and phone with a follow-up postal survey in order to facilitate a rapid response. Participants were recruited in their main language wherever possible.

Participants had previously consented to be a part of Born in Bradford and for their research and routine health and education data to be used for research. For this survey, and as approved by the HRA and Bradford/Leeds research ethics committee, verbal consent was taken for questionnaires completed over the phone and logged in the questionnaire database, implied consent was assumed for all questionnaires completed via post or online.

Key questionnaire domains for the survey were co-produced with the Bradford Institute for Health Research Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Group 14 and key policy and decision makers within Bradford, based upon hypothesised areas of impact for vulnerable families and their likely mediators. Questions were selected from validated questionnaires, from previous Born in Bradford questionnaires or were devised specifically for this survey. The full questionnaire is available on our website 14 and as Extended data 15 , key domains were:

• Household Circumstances : number of children, adults and bedrooms in the house; housing tenure 16 , quality of housing; clinical vulnerability to, and self-isolation due to Covid-19 17 .

• Family relationships and social support : partner relationship 18 , parenting competency 19 , social support, and loneliness 20 .

• Financial security ; employment security 21 ; housing security; food insecurity 22 .

• Physical Health 23 and health anxiety 24 ; smoking, alcohol and physical activity.

• Mental Health : depression (PHQ-8 25 ) and anxiety (GAD-7 26 ).

• Main worries, challenges and any positive aspects of lockdown : open ended questions.

Ethnicity was captured in self-reported questionnaires administered at baseline recruitment to the cohorts (March 2007 to December 2010 for BiB; January 2016 to February 2020 for BiBBS); and categorised as ‘White British’, ‘Pakistani Heritage’ and Other (there were small numbers of non-White British, non-Pakistani Heritage parents from multiple ethnic groups). We linked residential address (as at 31st March 2019) to the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation 27 .

Statistical analysis

Descriptive statistics are presented for each of the survey domains. We used cross tabulations (proportions and 95% confidence intervals) to explore differences in outcomes (e.g. forms of economic insecurity and mental health outcomes) by ethnicity and current financial security to look for different experiences based on these key vulnerabilities. For financial insecurity we used the question: “How well would you say you are managing financially right now?”. Answer options are: living comfortably, doing alright, just about getting by, finding it quite difficult, finding it very difficult. The latter two options were grouped and categorised as indicating current financial insecurity.

For depression we used total scores on the PHQ8 and standard categorisations (0 to 4 no depression, 5 to 9 mild depression, 10 to 14 moderate depression, 15 to 19 moderately severe depression and 20 to 24 severe depression) 25 . Similarly, for anxiety we employed total scores on the GAD7 and standard categorisations (0 to 4 no anxiety, 5 to 9 mild anxiety, 10 to 14 moderate anxiety and 15 to 21 severe anxiety 26 ). Moderate, moderately severe and severe categories were collapsed to indicate clinically important symptoms of depression and anxiety.

The majority of respondents (95%) were mothers, with the remaining 5% being partners. As most partners lived in the same households as the mothers, we completed analyses using the mothers’ response to avoid duplicate responses on household questions. Cross tabulations of partners responses were completed to look for differences in outcomes of partners compared to mothers. All statistical analyses were carried out using Stata 15 28 .

Text responses to the open questions were explored by thematic analysis 29 . The first 100 responses were analysed by one researcher (BL), employing an inductive approach where coding and theme development were driven by the content of the responses. Two codebooks were developed, one for the questions on the three biggest worries and recent challenges during lockdown and another smaller codebook for the question on what had been made more enjoyable and easier during lockdown. The remaining responses were then coded by three different researchers in order to test the strength and validity of the codebooks. Through frequent discussion between the researchers about this process, adjustments were made to the original codebooks so that they were reflective of the total responses.

This research was approved by the HRA and Bradford/Leeds research ethics committee (BiB Growing Up study 16/YH/0320; BiBBS study 15/YH/0455).

Out of a total of 7,652 eligible participants, 2,144 (28%) participated in this first study between 10th April and 30 th June 2020. 2,043 were mothers and 101 partners, of whom 64 were from the same household as a mother in the sample. 1,581 (74%) were from the BiBGU cohort and 563 (26%) from the BiBBS cohort (see Figure 1 ).

Participants had a mean age of 38 years (SD 7); the mean age in the BiBGU cohort was 40 (SD 6) and in the BiBBS cohort it was 32 (SD 6). 957 (47%) are of Pakistani heritage, 715 (35%) of White British ethnicity and 356 (18%) of other ethnicities. A total of 971 (46%) respondents live in the most deprived decile of material deprivation in England (IMD 2019). The participants were broadly representative of the BiB and BiBBS cohorts (see Table 1 ).

*Age as at 1 st April 2020 for baseline cohort and date of survey for Covid sample (April to June 2020).

BiB, Born in Bradford; BiBGU, Born in Bradford Growing Up; BiBBS, Born in Bradford’s Better Start.

Financial insecurity

When asked about current financial security, 403 (20%) of families were living comfortably, 857 (43%) were doing alright, 501 (25%) were just about getting by and 237 (12%) were finding it difficult or very difficult to manage. 627 (33%) respondents said they were worse off during lockdown compared to three months previously and 88 (9%) were better off. White British families were more financially secure, and more often reported being better off during lockdown. Families of Pakistani heritage were the least financially secure and more often reported being worse off during the lockdown (see Table 2 ).

Those families that were financially insecure were more likely to report being worse off now than before lockdown. In contrast, those that were living comfortably were more likely to report being better off during lockdown (Supplementary Table 1, extended data ).

The first UK lockdown had a large impact on current employment status with 228 (11%) of main earners within the household currently self-employed but not working and 292 (15%) furloughed 1 . Table 3 shows that White British families were more likely to be still working and that Pakistani families were more likely to be self-employed but unable to work. Financial insecurity was associated with households where the main earner was self-employed and not working, furloughed, or unemployed (see Figure 2 ). The most secure households were those where the main earner was employed and still working. It is plausible that the financial insecurities identified here may be explained by the type of employment held by the main earner in the household, rather than being directly related to ethnicity.

Food, employment and housing insecurity

A high number of participants reported insecurities in food, employment and housing (see Supplementary Tables 2a-c, e xtended data ).

Food insecurity was frequently reported with 396 (20%) mothers saying that their food often didn’t last and they couldn’t afford to buy more, and 180 (9%) having to regularly cut the size of, or skip, meals because there wasn’t enough money for food. 204 (10%) of households were worried about losing their home (eviction/repossession) and 728 (37%) families were worried about the job security of the main earner.

Figure 3 shows that White British families were more food, employment and housing secure whilst families of Pakistani heritage were the least secure in terms of food and employment and the ‘other’ ethnic group was the least housing secure. Figure 4 shows that financial insecurity was strongly associated with food, employment and housing insecurity, whereas financial security appeared to protect against food, employment and housing insecurity.

Household circumstances

A large proportion of families live in poor quality and overcrowded housing with damp/mould (N=574, 28%), vermin problems (N=347, 17%), major repairs needed (N= 262, 13%) and 364 (19%) reporting two or more people per bedroom. Poor quality housing was most common in families of Pakistani heritage and in those who were financially insecure. Overcrowding was most common in families of Pakistani heritage and other ethnic groups compared to White British families; it was also more common in those who were financially insecure. 464 (23%) lived in a household with someone clinically vulnerable to Covid-19 (advised to shield, >70 or pregnant), this was more common in Pakistani heritage families than White British and other ethnic groups, but there were no differences based on financial security. 558 (28%) reported that their household had self-isolated at some point, there were no ethnic differences in self isolation, however, those that were financially insecure were more likely to have needed to self isolate (see Figure 3 & Figure 4 and Supplementary Table 3, extended data ).

Family relationships

A large majority of mothers (N=1,770, 87%) were married or in a relationship. Most mothers reported an excellent or good relationship with their partner (N=1,537 90%); 180 (10%) reported their relationship as average/poor. There was no ethnic difference in relationship quality ( Figure 3 ), however an average/poor relationship was more likely in those who were financially insecure ( Figure 4 ). Other variables associated with an average/poor relationship included being, in poor health and those with moderate/severe depression or moderate/severe anxiety (see Supplementary table 4, e xtended data ).

A lack of confidence in supporting home learning was reported by 414 (24%) mothers, there were no ethnic differences ( Figure 3 ), but a lack of confidence was more common in those with severe financial insecurity ( Figure 4 ). Other variables associated with a lack of confidence included poor health, moderate-severe depression and moderate/severe anxiety. (see also Supplementary table 5, extended data ).

Social support and isolation

607 (31%) mothers reported feeling lonely some of the time, and 199 (10%) reported feeling lonely most or all of the time. White British mothers were more likely to feel lonely some of the time, but there were no ethnic differences in those feeling lonely most/all of the time ( Figure 3 ). Loneliness (most/all of the time) was more common in those who were financially insecure ( Figure 4 ). Other variables associated with loneliness were unemployment, poor health, moderate/severe depression or moderate/severe anxiety (see Supplementary table 6, e xtended data ).

A minority of participants (N=264, 13%) said it was difficult to get practical help from friends, family or neighbours, if they needed it. This was most common in mothers from other ethnic groups ( Figure 3 ), and in those who were financially insecure ( Figure 4 ). Other associated variables were unemployment poor health, and those with moderate-severe depression and moderate-severe anxiety (Supplementary table 7, extended data ).

Physical health and health behaviours

A low percentage of mothers reported having poor general health (N=135, 7%). There were no ethnic differences ( Figure 3 ), but this number more than doubled in households that were financially insecure ( Figure 4 ). Other associations were with unemployment, and poor housing conditions (see Supplementary table 8, e xtended data ).

A large proportion of mothers who smoked (N=191, 9%) or drank alcohol (N=533, 26%) reported smoking more (N=70, 37%) and drinking more (N=164, 31%) during the first lockdown. Nearly half of mothers (N=832, 47%) reported doing less physical activity in lockdown than before. 118 (6%) reported that their children did no physical activity at all, 300 (15%) did exercise 1–2 times a week. Mothers of Pakistani heritage were most likely to do no physical activity ( Figure 3 ) as were those who were financially insecure ( Figure 4 ). Other associated variables were poor health, moderate/severe depression or moderate/severe anxiety (see Supplementary table 9, e xtended data ).

341 (17%) of mothers reported worrying about their health most or all of the time. There were no ethnic differences in those who worried most or all of the time ( Figure 3 ), however this was more common in those who were financially insecure ( Figure 4 ). Other variables associated were unemployment, poor quality housing, and where someone in the home was clinically vulnerable to Covid-19 and/or if the household had self-isolated at some point (Supplementary table 10, e xtended data ).

Mental health

Reports of depression and anxiety symptoms were high with 838 (43%) mothers reporting depression, 19% of whom had clinically important (moderate/severe) symptoms. 762 (39%) mothers reported anxiety, 16% of whom had clinically important (moderate/severe) symptoms. White British participants were most likely to be moderate/severely depressed but there were no ethnic differences in moderate/severe anxiety ( Figure 3 ). Moderate/Severe depression and moderate/severe anxiety were associated with financial insecurity ( Figure 4 ). Other associations were with food, employment and housing insecurity, unemployment, poor quality housing, having self-isolated at some point, poor physical health, loneliness and a lack of social support (see Supplementary Table 11, e xtended data) ,

The experiences of partners

101 (5% of all responses) partners completed the first survey making it difficult to generalize from their responses. Partners who responded were more likely to be White British (N= 38, 58%) and were more financially secure (N=34, 34% were living comfortably) than the mothers overall, but showed little difference to the mother’s responses for all other measures, see Supplementary Table 12 ( Extended data ) 29 .

The lived experiences of participants

We asked participants to tell us their biggest three worries at the time, a challenge they had faced in the last two weeks, and whether anything had been made easier or more enjoyable in lockdown. Some of the most commonly reported worries reflected those captured in the survey including financial insecurity and mental health concerns; other reported worries reflected concerns and challenges specific to Covid-19 including health anxieties, caring for or educating their children at home, seeing and supporting their family and friends, bereavement and wider fears about the impact of Covid-19 on society.

Health anxieties. The most commonly reported worry was that they themselves, their children and/or wider family members might catch the coronavirus and become seriously ill or die. Participants were particularly concerned if they perceived themselves or others to be at a heightened risk due to existing health conditions like diabetes and asthma or if someone in the household was a key worker:

‘I worry about contracting coronavirus particularly whilst at work and either becoming critically myself unwell or bringing it home to my family’

‘[I have] underlying health conditions so worried about becoming susceptible to the virus and how body would cope’

These health anxieties had changed people’s behaviour with some reporting being too scared to go out at all or infrequently:

‘I worry that I might die if I catch coronavirus and I worry how this will affect my children. I’m terrified they will be separated as I have 2 children with my ex-husband and one with my current. So I haven’t been outside in 10 weeks’

‘I'm worried my children are at risk if we go out so I only go out once a week at the weekend for a walk’

Respondents also often reported worrying about not seeing wider family and friends and being unable to help loved ones, especially if they lived far away or in another country.

‘Not being able to physically be there for my parents, dad very elderly and vulnerable and worrying if they died in these circumstances not being able to see them’

Some were experiencing recent bereavement of friends or family members, both Covid-19 and non-Covid 19 deaths, and were sad and distressed about being unable to attend their funerals and gather with loved ones for support.

‘I lost my mother 6 weeks ago and have not really been with it in terms of keeping up with my children's school work. Not really got grieve as people normally do’

‘Uncle passed away of Covid 19 - made it very real, can happen to anyone, happened so fast - couldn't be there with him, couldn't go to funeral. Did Boris, prince Charles get better care than him?’

Financial insecurity. The second most commonly reported worry was around financial, housing and employment insecurity. Some respondents reported that either they and/or their partner had already lost their job as a direct result of coronavirus and the lockdown, and many more were worried about this eventuality. It was clear, even from these brief responses, that for many participants, any change to income was a serious concern because they were only just managing to get by before the pandemic. For families already reliant on debt (credit cards and overdrafts) to get by, Covid-19 and lockdown measures had pushed them into deeper and longer-term debt.

‘I have maxed my credit card .. so I'm worrying how im going to pay it back and when I'm going to be able to pay it back’

‘We are surviving only on child credit tax and unable to pay rent, insurance even council tax all accounts are on overdraft limit’

Some reported having to work despite being advised not to due to Covid-19 vulnerability, or being subject to poor treatment from employers.

‘Husband's job, it took ages for his boss to furlough him and he's threatened him that he wont have a job when it ends. He also makes him come into work some days as he does with other staff who are furloughed’

I was advised to self-isolate with my husband as he is classed a vulnerable person. I could not do this as I would not of had the money to pay bills or buy food’

Mental health. Respondents frequently reported concerns about their mental health, such as existing mental ill health getting worse, and the mental load of managing work, home-schooling, childcare and domestic tasks alongside wider anxiety about their family’s health, increased money worries and concerns about what the future held.

‘Finding working from home and looking after children very demanding. No time alone. No silence. Surrounded by people and electronics all my waking hours.’

‘Balancing all our responsibilities - home schooling / going into work / working from home / housework - Feeling stressed’

‘‘I suffer from anxiety and because the situation we are in I feel like my anxiety has increased as I can’t do the normal things which I would normally do’

Some respondents reported not being able to access or feeling unable to access mental health services due to Covid-19 and lockdown measures:

‘Not getting my mental health support since the lockdown. My cpn. not returning your calls. It has made me a lot worse. I try to talk to my husband so i am not keeping everything inside’

‘Mental health, I have had previous issues in the past and am struggling and don't feel like I can approach my GP at the minute as it isn't an emergency’

Parents also frequently reported concerns about their children’s mental health, particularly older children aged 11–16. They were considered to be particularly affected by lockdown and not being able to attend school as this was a time being able to socialise outside the family was more important. In addition, participants with children with special educational needs were especially concerned about their mental health and wellbeing, feeling less able to access sources of external support and worried about the long-term effects:

‘I worry about my eldest child's mental well-being as she hates not being able to socialise. She does not like playing outside alone’

‘My 13 year old son was offered school during lockdown but didn't take the offer as I don't want him to catch the virus - he is depressed at home’

‘Mental health of children (especially youngest). Desperately missing social interaction with friends, school and all his sporting activities. He is getting increasingly angry’

Home schooling. The open text questions revealed home schooling to be a source of tension within the home and parents were worried about their children becoming demotivated, getting behind at school, their future prospects if they were nearing important exams and poor behaviour. Some parents reported finding it particularly difficult to home school and keep their children entertained and focused if they had special educational needs like autism or ADHD. Problems with home schooling were compounded by a lack of necessary devices like laptops or tablets and issues with broadband capacity.

‘Every day is a challenge to get our 11 year old daughter out of bed before lunchtime and engaged in an activity’

‘Worrying about our children's education and mental health. Both have autism and are finding the change in situation very challenging’

My son has behavioural problems partly due to medical reasons these behaviour issues have got a lot worse than normal due to all the change, no school, no routine, not seeing any family or friends’

Other worries and concerns. Many participants reported stress and anxiety around food shopping. There was a lot of fear around attending supermarkets and catching the virus, difficulties finding specific grocery items and catering for children with dietary requirements. Others shared their concerns about coming out of lockdown, being anxious about going into crowded places and what the new normal might look like.

‘ How will I manage things after the lockdown, as it makes me anxious people not standing at a distance and I worry how I will gel into the situation when we are outside and getting back into normal’

There were also a large number of participants concerned about what the virus and subsequent government measures would mean for wider society. They were worried about the country’s economic and political future and how people who were more vulnerable than themselves were coping. Participants reported feeling worried about the future, feeling helpless, unable to switch off from the news cycle and struggling to manage negative emotions around their children and offer them comfort.

‘Trying to be strong for my children and convince them that everything is going to be okay’

‘How the 'new' normal is going to affect our lives moving forward. Work, sports clubs, socialising, seeing family etc.’

‘How and when will it be safe to go back to normality, how long is it going to last, will it get worse?’

Positive aspects of lockdown. One of the open-ended questions did enable people to report some positive aspects of the lockdown. When asked if there was anything that had become easier or more enjoyable since lockdown, some participants reported that nothing had improved, with many more reporting some positive consequences. These included getting to spend more quality time with their children, enjoying a slower pace of life, a more relaxed routine and spending less time driving and commuting. With less rushing to get to and from school, work and extracurricular activities, a number of participants reported that they were sleeping better, taking more time to cook meals and eating together as a family.

‘Life has become a lot more relaxed over the last 3 weeks, no manic mornings trying to get everybody out of the house, time with kids, doing stuff with kids I would normally say 'not now' to. Get to know kids more. More time outside, [doing] jobs in the house that need doing’

‘Being together with children and family. There has been more family time as usually life is so busy and the children are at school or with their friends. Have enjoyed every minute of being together more as a family’

Some participants who had children with health issues and/or special educational needs reported that it was easier to manage within the home:

‘It's been easier to support my son and help him gain weight, he always eats better at home than at school so he has managed to gain a bit of weight’

‘Not having to get kids ready for school and also as my eldest has epilepsy he had constant seizures in school and at home he's not had one’

This Covid-19 survey within an ongoing longitudinal study describes some of the key experiences of families living in the deprived and ethnically diverse city of Bradford during the first Covid-19 lockdown (March 23rd 2020). The findings have highlighted inequalities in living circumstances with a large proportion of ethnic minority families and those who are financially insecure having endured this stage of the pandemic in poor and overcrowded housing conditions. Economic insecurities were frequently reported with more than one-third reporting financial insecurity, and one-in-ten reporting serious economic difficulties such as having to regularly skip meals and serious concerns about being evicted or having their home repossessed. In addition, there were strong associations between financial insecurity and poor family relationships, mental health and negative health behaviours.

We found that many families who had lost income due to being self-employed and not able to work, being furloughed, or recently unemployed, found themselves in perilous financial, food and employment insecurity. Importantly, there was also higher financial insecurity reported in families who had needed to self isolate. Whilst the furlough scheme and support to self-employed workers was designed to provide support during this difficult time, our findings suggest that the loss of income for those on low wages is enough to tip families into financial difficulty, and potentially further exacerbate health inequalities. These findings reflect other research that has highlighted ethnic minority and deprived families as at high risk of financial and food insecurities 5 , 6 .

Another major concern uncovered in the survey was the mental health of mothers, with 18% reporting clinically significant depression symptoms and 16% clinically significant anxiety symptoms. Many participants also raised concerns about the mental health of their children. These findings reflect depression and anxiety prevalence rates reported in other lockdown surveys 3 , 4 . Depression was associated with White British ethnicity and both depression and anxiety were associated with financial insecurity, in addition to a number of other variables including poor housing, poor health and loneliness. Further exploration of this finding is planned to understand the underlying causes of increased poor mental health and ethnic differences.

Policy makers and commissioners must intervene to provide greater support to these families. Families need support to enable them to manage financially and stop them becoming homeless and living in food poverty. Increasing access to support for mental wellbeing is also critical during and after the pandemic. Whilst specialist services should focus on treating those with moderate to severe depression and anxiety, commissioners and policy makers must also consider broader, population-based preventative measures for those with mild symptoms.

Whilst the physical health of families was good overall, participants who smoked or drank alcohol often reported smoking/drinking more during lockdown and a large number reported doing less, or no exercise. Poor housing and lack of access to outdoor space were also common in this population. The increase of negative health behaviours in addition to living in poor housing conditions with a lack of access to safe green space puts people at risk of developing, or exacerbating, non-communicable diseases and co-morbidities such as diabetes, hypertension and respiratory illnesses, conditions that in turn increase risk of worse outcomes of the Covid-19 virus.

More than one quarter of families had a person vulnerable to Covid-19 living in their household. Our open ended questions identified that health anxieties about catching the Covid-19 virus and becoming severely ill or dying was the most commonly reported worry and had a negative impact on behaviors such as exercise. There has been concern across the UK about the dramatic drop in use of health services, and a lack of uptake of school places, especially for vulnerable children during lockdown. Given the high anxiety of being exposed to Covid-19, particularly in families living with a vulnerable person, methods to reassure and encourage vulnerable families to access critical services, return to work and school and engage in exercise needs to be considered extremely carefully and sensitively.

The free text responses complemented the findings from the quantitative survey, but also highlighted: high levels of worry and fear around the virus which had changed families behaviours and concerns around children’s mental health and the challenges of home schooling. Some families also noted positive aspects of the lockdown including less stress and better quality family time. These findings provide helpful insights for future research which we aim to focus on childrens’ mental health, childrens’ home learning / return to school, and what factors provide resilience in families to enable them to recover quickly from the pandemic.

Strengths and limitations

These findings demonstrate a host of negative experiences during the first UK Covid-19 lockdown for families living in the ethnically diverse and deprived city of Bradford. We used multiple methods to obtain a high response in a timely way, but acknowledge that the overall low response may have introduced selection bias. Comparing results with other studies of similar and differing populations will be important to gain a fuller picture of the impact of the pandemic and its management on social and health inequalities. The longitudinal nature of our research with the BiB cohorts will allow us to look for change over time, comparing pre-pandemic data, as well as continued follow up of families over a one year period from April 2020 to March 2021 thereby adding more value to this research. Since this survey, the UK has experienced two further national lockdowns, as well as regional restrictions in between, and results reported here will form a baseline for understanding the ongoing and cumulative impact of the pandemic.

The effect of the pandemic and lockdown may be socially patterned, with the most vulnerable in society bearing the brunt. Vulnerable families could be pushed into poverty and worsening mental ill health. There is a need for policy makers and commissioners to consider how to better support vulnerable families to enable them to manage financially and avoid them becoming homeless and living in debt and food poverty. There is also a need to provide support for a significant proportion of people who are now suffering from depression and anxiety, enabling services for severe cases and preventative interventions for those with mild symptoms to stop these getting worse. There is also a need to develop methods to reassure and encourage vulnerable families to access health and education services with immediate effect to stop these health inequalities becoming even worse.

Data availability

Acknowledgements.

Born in Bradford is only possible because of the enthusiasm and commitment of the children and parents in BiB. We are grateful to all the participants, health professionals and researchers who have made Born in Bradford happen.

We acknowledge the input of the wider Bradford Institute for Health Research Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Group 11 in the preparation of this protocol which includes (in addition to the named authors: Abigail Dutton, Bo Hou, Tom Lawton, Dan Mason, Michael McCooe, Mark Mon-Williams, Gill Santorelli, Laura Sheard, Najma Sidiqqi, Kuldeep Sohal, Jane West).

This report is based on independent research partly funded by the National Institute for Health Research Yorkshire and Humber ARC. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Institute for Health Research or the Department of Health and Social Care.

[version 2; peer review: 2 approved]

Funding Statement

This study has been funded through The Health foundation COVID-19 Award [2301201]. This work was supported by a Wellcome Trust infrastructure grant [101597] (PI: DAL, JW, RM); a joint grant from the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [MR/N024391/1] (PI: KP and DAL, JW, RM); the National Institute for Health Research under its Applied Research Collaboration Yorkshire and Humber [NIHR200166] (PI: JW; KP, RM, JD, CC); ActEarly UK Prevention Research Partnership Consortium [MR/S037527/1] (PI JW; CIs RM, JD, KP, TS, LS); the NIHR Clinical Research Network, which provided research delivery support for this study; and the National Lottery Community Fund, which provided funding for BiBBS through the Better Start Bradford programme.

1 On the furlough scheme, eligible employees were paid 80% of their usual wages by the Government

Reviewer response for version 2

Sharon goldfeld.

1 Policy and Equity, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia

2 Population Health, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia

I have read and reviewed the article and the authors have addressed the concerns from both reviewers. There is far greater clarity and  the results are more aligned to the original research questions. The bar graphs are a very useful way of depicting the data.

Is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature?

If applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate?

Are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility?

Is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound?

Are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results?

Are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others?

Reviewer Expertise:

Child public health, health inequities, public policy, paediatrics.

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

Reviewer response for version 1

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper which was a pleasure to read. The results from this survey demonstrate firstly that, as we have always known, the social determinants continue to be the source of inequity for families and their children regardless of the pandemic. Both BBGU and BiBBS have a long history of exploring these issues. The authors have presented wide ranging data from a survey in these 2 existing cohorts in Bradford, UK. These cohorts are known for their ethnic diversity and general disadvantage. The cohorts are more or less concurrent but with different child ages. The authors have surveyed these families using a phone/postal survey in April-June 2020 which overlapped with the first wave and lockdown in response to COVID-19 in the UK. While the descriptive data are interesting, the volume of tables and lack of comparison to previous “states” means that it is difficult to both get a sense of the overall picture (too many tables) and to really understand the impact of the lockdown as opposed to the previous conditions and outcomes for these families. A potential reframe might be to focus on (1) where there are data to note the impact of the lockdown and pandemic using data that had questions focussed on “compared to” e.g. smoking or where there are data that are specific to the pandemic e.g. children learning from home or potentially those being furloughed and change in financial status and then (2) note that there is a substantial burden of disadvantage for these families that will inevitably worsen during the 2 waves of the pandemic (international data are already showing this) with COVID-19 exposing the inequity gaps in our systems.

Further details are outlined below.

Introduction:

While noting that the aim was to describe the various outcomes for these families, it may be more helpful to have a sense of what the authors might hypothesise here in terms of the differential impact of the lockdown.

The descriptive methods here are quite straightforward.

It was difficult to get a clear view of the differential impact of the lock down itself on specific populations and /or the different cohorts. There are too many tables each of which are quite complex to read. I wonder if a number of them might go into a supplementary set of files but a key number related to the lockdown impact where those questions/measures exist could be highlighted in the paper itself. This might hook back into the actual research question being asked here i.e. is the question about the differential impact of lockdown/the pandemic on families.

Given there are previous data I can only assume these comparisons will be published at a later time and hence the use of questions that I am sure align with previous cohort data collection. The strongest data related to those whose employment/financial status had changed. For this paper this would make the most sense to have as the anchor for all the tables and then to have the other tables in the supplementary files noting they might form the basis of another paper with comparative data and perhaps taking into account some of the confounding that might be contributing to the differences across ethnic groups. The qual data also aligns with the impact of loss of employment so works well.

Of note the response rate of 28% was relatively low although it appears that the sample is relatively representative of the overall sample with some exceptions such as seemingly lower proportions of Pakistani families.

The graphs were definitely easier to read than the tables

Discussion/Conclusion:

I think the challenge of this paper is to anchor it more to a research question as it currently reads more like a report. The authors’ conclusions regard the importance of noting the vulnerability of populations even before COVID-19 is well placed. Data to support how COVID-19 has worsened people’s circumstances would strengthen this paper.

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.

Bradford Hospitals National Health Service Trust, UK

Thank you for your detailed review and helpful comments. We have submitted a revised version to re-frame the paper as suggested by this reviewer:

​​​​​​​1.   Introduction

• We have added clarity to the introduction regarding our hypothesis – that health inequalities are likely to have worsened during the pandemic and we intend to look at differential impacts based on ethnicity and current financial insecurity.
• We have clarified the intentions of the wider programme of research in the introduction:
• a) That this paper reports the participant characteristics and the immediate health, social and economic status (by ethnicity and financial insecurity) during the first  survey of BiB parents undertaken during April – June 2020. One of our underlying aims of this paper was to make our Covid-19 survey findings widely available to researchers and policy makers as quickly as possible.
• b) That future plans are in place to use longitudinal data from before the pandemic, and from future surveys during the pandemic, to describe the trajectories, and identify the long-term consequences, of the pandemic on vulnerable populations.
• The majority of the detailed tables are now supplementary tables, and we have used figures to more easily describe the data.
• As above, the results section is now hooked onto the hypothesis regarding differential impacts for ethnic minorities and those experiencing current financial insecurity. Other associations found are then described where relevant

3. Discussion / Conclusion

• We have added in references to recent papers that show similar findings to ours within England, further elaborated on the strengths / limitations section, and added in more about future research questions.

Malavika Subramanyam

1 Social Epidemiology, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, India

This study describes the findings from a detailed survey of living conditions, psychological well-being, stresses, and lived experiences of a multi-ethnic socioeconomically disadvantaged sub-sample of the Born in Bradford cohorts during the Covid-19 lockdown. Unsurprisingly, the authors find that substantial proportions of the analytical sample lives in poor quality housing, has economic, housing, and food insecurities. Moreover, it was the socioeconomically disadvantaged sub-groups that reported greater proportions of depression and anxiety symptoms. The study underscores the burden of housing, economic, and psychological health issues in this population.

An international audience would benefit from a brief comparison of the socioeconomic profile of the final analytical sample with those of Bradford and other major urban areas in England. A note on the unique contribution of the current study, beyond providing data to policy-makers interested specifically in Bradford, would also be helpful.

The reader would also benefit from seeing a comparison of these lockdown prevalences of mental health outcomes with pre-pandemic prevalences in the same population. Similarly, it would be helpful to identify how the prevalence of the outcomes in this study compare with similar figures from the rest of England (or at least samples similar to the general English population).

One stated goal of the study was the "identify any other areas of concern for future research questions". It would have been helpful if the authors had expanded more on this point. The free-text responses to the open-ended questions appear to have provided rich data. Perhaps those responses lead to interesting questions for the future?

A few clarifications will further strengthen this excellent and detailed descriptive study. For instance, the abstract could clarify that a mix of telephonic, online, and paper-based surveys were used. And on a related note, a clarification could be added to the main text about any differences in the pattern of answers by the mode of survey data collection 

Finally, the authors are requested to highlight a key finding which is specific and policy-relevant in the "conclusions" section of the abstract. For instance, perhaps they could offer a comparison with other cities/sub-groups or comment on the policies/programs in place which may need to be tweaked on the basis of these findings?

Social epidemiology.

Thank you for your review. We have noted the requests for clarity and trust that the revised version now provides that clarity, in particular:  

• Method of data collection have been added to the abstract
• The abstract conclusion has been amended to highlight how we will use the longitudinal data to make more generalizable findings relevant to national policy.
• The discussion highlights how the sample compares to other findings from England
• The discussion highlights the unique contribution that this longitudinal study makes, and that this is the first of a planned series of follow-ups and analyses using longitudinal data to further explore changes in mental health and economic insecurity from pre-pandemic to during the pandemic.

We have also expanded on the identification of future research questions, particularly from the free text responses in the discussion section. Thank you for noting this omission.

We have not looked at differences in responses by completion mode (e.g. by phone/paper), but agree that this would be interesting. We plan to look at this, as well as potential differences in responses by time (e.g. immediate, compared to later lockdown) and will follow this up, perhaps as a separate methods paper.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Time and emotion during lockdown and the covid-19 epidemic: determinants of our experience of time.

• 1 Université Clermont Auvergne, CNRS, LAPSCO, F-63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
• 2 Université de Poitiers et CNRS, UMR7295 Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l’Apprentissage, Poitiers, France

To fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease, more than 3 billion people in the world have been confined indoors. Although lockdown is an efficient solution, it has had various psychological consequences that have not yet been fully measured. During the lockdown period in France (April 2020), we conducted two surveys on two large panels of participants to examine how the lockdown disrupted their relationship with time and what this change in their experiences of time means. Numerous questions were asked about the experience of time but also the nature of life during the lockdown: the emotions felt, boredom, the activities performed, sleep quality, and the daily rhythm. The participants also completed a series of self-reported scales used to assess depression, anxiety, and impulsivity. The results showed that time seemed to pass more slowly during the lockdown compared to before. This feeling of a slowing down of time has little to do with living conditions during the lockdown and individual psychological characteristics. The main predictor of this time experience was boredom and partly mediated by the lack of activity. The feeling of being less happy and the presence of sleep disturbance also explained this specific experience of time albeit to a lesser extent.

Introduction

Due to the Covid-19 crisis, the spring of 2020 was lived in quite exceptional circumstances: more than 3 billion people around the world were confined, i.e., almost half of the world’s population. The lockdown was the only solution deemed to be effective in limiting the spread of the virus and the number of sick people and in keeping hospitals uncluttered. Lockdown is a single solution, but it has different psychological consequences that have not yet been fully measured. One initial consequence is a profound upheaval in our relationship with time. Recent international surveys on the judgment of the passage of time (PoT) during the lockdown suggested that people have experienced a slowing down of time ( Cellini et al., 2020 ; Droit-Volet et al., 2020 ; Ogden, 2020 ; Torboli et al., 2020 ). However, the different factors explaining this change in the experience of time during lockdown were not further analyzed in these initial surveys, which focused on a limited number of factors (e.g., stress, anxiety, social satisfaction, sleep disturbance). It is important to understand the processes underlying the conscious change in our relationship with time during lockdown because this is a familiar and easily accessible feeling that may be indicative of serious psychological problems in the future. The aim of the present study was therefore to further examine people’s experience of time during the lockdown and its different determinants.

Scientists working in the field of time perception have examined the PoT judged retrospectively over a long period of past life—5 or 10 years—(e.g., Wittmann and Lehnhoff, 2005 ; Friedman and Janssen, 2010 ; Janssen et al., 2013 ), but rarely the PoT judged in the present. For judgments of the present time, they have preferred to focus on the human ability to estimate durations based on a neural internal clock system. This has allowed them to avoid the complex question of the conscious judgment of the PoT involving higher-level psychological mechanisms specific to humans ( Jonas and Huguet, 2008 ; Wearden, 2015 ; Droit-Volet, 2018 ).

The few studies that have begun to examine the current PoT judgment have focused on several selective factors. For example, some authors have examined the role of time pressure and the number of routines in everyday life self-reported by the participants in their judgment of the speed of the PoT in the current life situation as well as for different past periods ( Wittmann et al., 2015 ; Winkler et al., 2017 ). Droit-Volet and her colleagues examined the emotion felt (happiness, arousal) and the complexity of the activity carried out and the attention it demanded ( Droit-Volet and Wearden, 2015 , 2016 ; Droit-Volet et al., 2017 ; Droit-Volet, 2019a ). Tipples (2018) added the sense of frustration when people are oriented more toward the future than to the present and when the expected event is delayed. Similarly, Wittmann referred to boredom in the specific case of waiting for 7–8 min in relation to individuals’ traits, such as impulsivity ( Wittmann et al., 2015 ; Jokic et al., 2018 ; Witowska et al., 2020 ). A general overview of these different studies suggests that PoT judgment is the result of a complex interaction between different kinds of intra- and inter-personal psychological mechanisms. In line with this, Larson, in her model, argued that the PoT judgment depends on the emotion felt, the individual’s cognitive involvement and the stimulus complexity, as well as on the quality of the occupation and the density of the experience ( Larson, 2004 ; Larson and von Eye, 2006 ). In sum, one might suggest that the experience of time is a simple mirror of the introspective analysis of the self made by individuals as a function of their personal, social, and environmental background ( Droit-Volet, 2018 ; Droit-Volet and Dambrun, 2019 ).

Accordingly, cognitive and emotional factors are undoubtedly intrinsically interconnected in the experience of time. In addition, the effect of the number of routines but also that of the occupation on the PoT judgment could be mediated by certain attention mechanisms related to the activity performed during the temporal period to be judged. Concerning attention mechanisms, Wearden et al. (2014) found that their participants experienced an acceleration of time when they focused their attention on an activity. Studies on consciousness and mindfulness in meditation practice clearly illustrate this critical role of attention mechanisms in the feeling of time (e.g., Wittmann et al., 2015 ; Droit-Volet et al., 2018a ; Droit-Volet and Dambrun, 2019 ). The effect of frustration or boredom on the PoT judgment could also be mediated by their associated emotions, namely, anger in the first case and reduced happiness in the second. Several studies have indeed shown the crucial role of emotion in the subjective experience of the PoT (e.g., Droit-Volet and Wearden, 2015 , 2016 ; Droit-Volet, 2019b ; Droit-Volet et al., 2019 ). The more aroused people feel, the more quickly they judge time to pass; the less happy they feel, the more slowly they judge it to pass. Finally, one can assume that activity (and the underlying attention mechanisms) and emotion—both in terms of valence (positive vs. negative) and level of arousal (high vs. low-arousal)—may be the main predictors of inter-individual differences in time experience during the lockdown and may, therefore, mediate the effect of other factors. In the present study on the experience of time during the lockdown, the participants had to answer a series of self-reported questions assessing both the activities practiced and the emotions felt together with other factors, such as boredom, the focus on the present, or the regularity of the daily rhythm.

What is more, lockdown has been a very unusual life experience in a closed environment in which the usual daily activities are disturbed. It can therefore be argued that living conditions (e.g., size of living space and number of people confined in the same space), sleep quality, which is influenced by the disruption of the daily rhythm, and intra-individual characteristics (e.g., anxiety, depression, and impulsivity) may also influence the experience of time. Indeed, it is easy to imagine that the experience of time will not be the same for people living in a small apartment and those living in a big house, especially when several people live together. As regards individual traits, it has been also shown that people suffering from depression find that time passes slower than other people (e.g., Bschor et al., 2004 ; Stanghellini et al., 2017 ; Vogel et al., 2018 ). In our study, which was conducted on a large sample of participants, we therefore also assessed the living conditions of the participants during lockdown and their psychological traits (i.e., depression, anxiety, happiness trait, impulsivity, and alexithymia).

Given that the lockdown experience is an unprecedented situation that has disrupted people’s everyday activities and thus their inherent feelings, the aim of the present study was to examine (1) the distorted experience of the PoT during compared to before the lockdown and (2) the specific factors underlying this distortion of time. Two large panels of French participants were surveyed in two different studies (i.e., 1332 in Study 1; 1116 in Study 2), both of which were conducted during the particularly strict lockdown imposed on citizens by the authorities in France from 17 March to 11 May 2020 (1–29 April for Study 1 and 24–28 April for Study 2). Using a series of self-reported Likert-type scales, we assessed their subjective time judgments and potentially related factors. We then examined each factor and its statistical relation with the passage-of-time experience, using mediation analyses when they were appropriate.

Participants

A total of 1332 French participants completed the online questionnaire: 1012 women and 320 men ( M A ge = 41.05, SD = 15.92; M Education years = 14.85, SD = 2.99) ( Table 1 ). They gave their consent after reading a form explaining the guarantee of anonymity and their freedom to stop the survey at any time. The questionnaire was reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University Clermont Auvergne (IRB00011540-2020-31).

Table 1. Description of participants surveyed in Studies 1 and 2.

The online questionnaire was implemented with LimeSurvey and the data hosted on the local server of the University Clermont Auvergne. Completing the questionnaire took about 40 min since it comprised a large number of questions including the questions of interest, which are described below and are the subject of this article. The questionnaire was distributed via social networks during the French lockdown period between 1 April and 29 April, the lockdown being ordered in France from 17 March to 11 May.

The questionnaire was composed of different demographic questions including questions on the life features of the lockdown: the area of the place of confinement (m 2 ), the number of people in the confinement site, the total time spent in the confinement site (0, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100%), and the average duration per day of authorized and unauthorized exits (0 min, 5–15 min, 16–30 min, 35 min–1 h, 1 h05–2 h, 2–4 h, and >4 h) ( Table 1 ).

With regard to the questions of interest, there were three questions on the experience of time (How do you feel about the speed of the PoT?) each examining three different periods: before the lockdown, during the lockdown, and the present (now). The participants answered on a seven-point scale from 1 ( very slow ) to 7 ( very fast ). A series of questions on the emotion felt were also asked with the same seven-point response scale but going from 1 ( not at all ) to 7 ( a lot ): happiness, anxiety, fear, anger, low arousal (calm/relaxed), and high arousal (stimulated/excited/alert/awake). The participants also answered a question about their feeling of boredom (Do you feel bored?) and whether they were engaging in activities that captured their attention. As for the experience of time, they answered these different questions for three periods: before, during the lockdown, and the present. They were also questioned on their focus on the present, the quality of their sleep (I sleep well) and the regular daily rhythm (the rhythm of my life is regular (waking, meals, and bedtime) but only for the periods before and during the lockdown.

In addition, the participants completed five validated and reliable self-reported scales ( Table 1 ): (1) the Subjective Authentic–Durable Happiness Scale (SA-DHS, Dambrun et al., 2012 ), which was developed to assess the happiness trait and consists of 16 items rated on a seven-point scale (maximum score = 112); (2) the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Beck et al., 1961 ) (maximum score = 39); (3) the six-item short form of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory ( Spielberger et al., 1983 ) (S-STAI, Marteau and Bekker, 1992 ) (maximum score = 24); (4) the 15-item short form of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale ( Barratt, 1959 ) with a nine-point scale (BIS 15, Spinella, 2007 ) (total score = 135); and (5) the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale ( Bagby et al., 1994 ), which makes use of a five-point scale (maximum score = 100). These scales were presented in a random order and their reliability was satisfactory (SA-DHS, α = 0.88; BDI, α = 0.82; S-STAI, α = 0.87; BIS 15, α = 0.82; and TAS = 0.84).

Statistical Analyses

A series of ANOVAs—with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons applied when necessary—were initially carried out on the time experience with the three periods as within-subject factors: i.e., before the lockdown, during the lockdown, and in the present (now). The same analyses with the three time periods were performed on the other questions of interest (emotion, boredom, activity, sleep, and daily rhythm) with the obvious exception of the questions on the living conditions during the lockdown. Then, as the difference in the judgments during the lockdown and the present was small or non-significant, we decided to calculate a difference index for each of the self-reported responses between before and during the lockdown, and we then transformed this into standardized values (z-scores). A positive value for the time judgment indicated that the participants experienced a slowing down of time during (compared to before) the lockdown, while a negative value indicated a speeding up of time and a null value indicated no change. Correlations between the temporal difference index and the difference index for the other factors were then examined. As previous studies of PoT have focused on a limited number of factors, in a comparative perspective, we decided sparingly to examine the correlation between PoT judgment and factors in each category of factors: lockdown features, psychological traits, emotion, boredom/activity, and sleep/daily rhythm. When several related factors were significantly correlated to time experience, we ran linear regressions by checking the inflation factor (VIF) for the multicollinearity in the regression analyses ( Thompson et al., 2017 ). Finally, for the significant predictors of the time experience, we tested mediation models to investigate the part of variance explained by possible mediating factors. The mediation analyses (5000 bootstraps) were performed using Process version 3 macro ( Hayes, 2018 ) for SPSS. This software was used for all the statistical analyses.

Results and Discussion

Time experience.

As illustrated in Figure 1 , the participants experienced a slowing down of time during the lockdown, both for the lockdown period ( M = 4.60, SD = 1.57) and in the present ( M = 4.45, SD = 1.52), as compared to before the lockdown ( M = 5.53, SD = 1.31) [ F (1,1331) = 347.17, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.21, F (1,1331) = 489.46, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.27]. Nevertheless, time appeared to pass faster when they considered a longer period of time (lockdown period) than simply the present moment, F (1,1331) = 35.13, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.02. However, as explained above, the effect size was very small, and we therefore decided to consider only the difference (z-scores) in the time experience between before and during the lockdown period in the subsequent analyses. Marital status (single vs. not single) and the fact of having or not having a professional activity did not play a significant role in the difference in the time judgment between the two periods (before vs. during the lockdown). Table 2 indicates that the experience of time also did not vary with the participant’s age ( R = 0.01, p = 0.63). There was only a relatively small but significant negative correlation between the time judgment and the level of education ( R = −0.10, p < 0.0001), suggesting that time tended to pass faster during the lockdown for the participants with a higher level of education.

Figure 1. Mean rating of the passage of time for before, during the lockdown and for the present period (Now).

Table 2. Correlation matrix between age, education, and lockdown features for Studies 1 and 2.

In conclusion, the lockdown predicted the experience of time—a slowing down of the PoT—without major modulation of people demographic features.

Lockdown Features and Time Experience

Table 1 reports the participants’ answers to questions about their living conditions. It appears that the participants complied with the confinement rules, with 95.6 % of individuals staying at home for 80% or more of their time, and the majority of them not exceeding an average of 5–30 min per day of authorized outings (60%) and less than 15 min of unauthorized outings (51%).

The analysis of the relationships between the time experience (the difference between the experience of the PoT before and during the lockdown) and the lockdown conditions of the participants indicated that the changes in time judgments were only weakly or not at all related to the living conditions during lockdown ( Table 2 ). Their time judgments did not vary with the size of the living space ( R = 0.03, p = 0.24) and the number of confined people living together in the same space ( R = 0.04, p = 0.17). The fact of having or not having an outdoor space adjacent to one’s dwelling reduced the feeling of time dragging only very slightly, F (1,1330) = 3.94, p = 0.05, η 2 p = 0.003. It seemed that those who spent more time away from home felt time passed a little faster ( R = −0.07, p = 0.01). However, this was only a trend, and the proportion of variance explained was very small.

In sum, our study suggests that life conditions during lockdown did not have a major impact on the experience of time.

Psychological Characteristics and Time Experience

The participants’ scores on the different self-reported scales are presented in Table 1 and the correlation between these scores and the experience of time in Table 3 . The results in Table 3 indicate that the experience of time had very little or no relation to participants’ scores on the different psychological scales used in our study. Their time experience was related neither to the happiness trait ( R = 0.01, p > 0.05) nor to the level of impulsivity ( R = 0.01, p > 0.05). It tended nevertheless to pass more slowly in the most depressed and anxious participants ( R = 0.08, R = 0.08, p < 0.01) and in those who had difficulty expressing their emotions (Alexithymia) ( R = 0.10, p < 0.01). However, when we included these three significant factors (depression, anxiety, and alexithymia) in the same linear regression model, each of them lost their predictive power ( R = 0.13, R 2 = 0.018, p = 0.001; depression, B = 0.025, ES = 0.037, β = 0.026, t = 0.69, p = 0.49; anxiety, B = 0.058, ES = 0.036, β = 0.057, t = 1.59, p = 0.11; and alexithymia, B = 0.055, ES = 0.034, β = 0.055, t = 1.65, p = 0.10).

Table 3. Correlation matrix between age, education, and scores on the self-reported scales for Studies 1 and 2.

In sum, the scores on the psychological trait scales used in our study did not significantly explain the inter-individual differences in the feeling of the PoT with the lockdown.

Emotion and Time Experience

The statistical analyses indicated that differences in the emotional ratings between the lockdown period and the present were either not significant (happiness: M lockdown = 4.49, SD lockdown = 1.46, M present = 4.49, SD present = 1.55, F < 1), or significant but with a small effect size [High-Arousal: M lockdown = 3.42, SD lockdown = 1.67, M present = 3.13, SD present = 1.64, F (1,1331) = 126.35, η 2 p = 0.09; Low-Arousal, M lockdown = 3.96, SD lockdown = 1.63, M present = 4.21, SD present = 1.65, F (1,1331) = 103.06, η 2 p = 0.07, all p < 0.001], or the ratings were higher for the period of lockdown than for the immediate feeling [Anger: M lockdown = 3.03, SD lockdown = 1.83, M present = 2.27, SD present = 1.64, F (1,1331) = 506.60, η 2 p = 0.28; Fear, M lockdown = 3.21, SD lockdown = 1.74, M present = 2.54, SD present = 1.62, F (1,1331) = 513.21, η 2 p = 0.28; Anxiety, M lockdown = 3.57, SD lockdown = 1.85, M present = 2.89, SD present = 1.77, F (1,1331) = 482.44, η 2 p = 0.26, all p < 0.001]. Therefore, we decided to limit the subsequent analyses to the comparison between before and during the lockdown ( Figure 2 ).

Figure 2. Mean rating of emotions felt before and during the lockdown.

The statistical analyses on the emotional ratings comparing the periods before and during the lockdown ( Figure 2 ) showed that the lockdown had a major influence on the participants’ emotions. They did indeed report that the lockdown had an impact both in terms of emotional valence (positive vs. negative) and level of arousal (low vs. high-arousal). The participants reported being less aroused during the lockdown than before the lockdown [Low-arousal: 3.96 vs. 3.82 (SD before = 1.59), F (1,1331) = 9.78, η 2 p = 0.007, High-arousal: 3.42 vs. 3.92 ( SD before = 1.86), F (1,1331) = 122.29, η 2 p = 0.084]. They also felt less happy during than before the lockdown [4.49 vs. 5.06 ( SD = 1.35), F (1,1331) = 262.31, η 2 p = 0.17], and reported being more angry, more anxious, and more fearful [angry: 3.03 vs. 2.63 ( SD = 1.66), F (1,1331) = 88.87, η 2 p = 0.06; anxiety: 3.57 vs. 3.17 ( SD = 1.81), F (1,1331) = 80.34, η 2 p = 0.06; fear: 3.21 vs. 2.28 ( SD = 1.47), F (1,1331) = 439.72, η 2 p = 0.25, all p < 0.001]. However, among the negative emotions, the effect size was lower for anxiety (η 2 p = 0.06) and anger (η 2 p = 0.06) than for fear (η 2 p = 0.25). Thus, the lockdown was associated with increased feelings of fear and decreased feelings of happiness.

The analyses of correlations ( Table 4 ) between the time experience and the emotional feeling (difference in emotion before and during the lockdown) revealed that the feeling of the PoT was highly sensitive to the emotions felt since the subjective time judgment was significantly related to all the emotions reported (all p < 0.01). However, the correlation level was higher for happiness ( R = 0.25, p < 0.0001) than for the other emotions.

Table 4. Correlation matrix between age, education, emotions, boredom, activity, present focus, sleep quality, and daily rhythm for Studies 1 and 2.

Although to a lesser extent, the negative emotions were also correlated with the experience of time, with time being judged to pass slower as the levels of anxiety, fear, and anger increased ( R = −0.17, R = −0.14, R = −0.12, respectively, all p < 0.01). However, the linear regression analysis, with these three negative emotions included in the same model, indicated that anxiety [ B = −0.124, ES = 0.033, β = −0.124, t = −3.72, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (−0.189, −0.06), VIF = 1.523] and anger [ B = −0.085, ES = 0.029, β = −0.085, t = −2.889, p = 0.004, 95% CIs (−0.142, −0.027), VIF = 1.198] were the only reliable predictors of changes in the experience of time. Indeed, the emotion of fear lost its predictive power [ B = −0.02, ES = 0.033, β = −0.02, t = −0.62, p = 0.54, 95% CIs (−0.084, 0.044), VIF = 1.458]. As the hierarchical regression analyses indicated, the total proportion of variance explained by anxiety remained small ( R = 0.17, R 2 = 0.028) and adding anger to the model increased the proportion of variance explained ( R = 0.186, R 2 = 0.034) only very little (Δ < 0.01).

The participants, who indicated a decrease in the level of arousal due to the lockdown, also expressed a slowing down of time (low-arousal, R = 0.08, p = 0.004, high-arousal, R = 0.12, p < 0.0001). These two arousal-related factors remained significant predictors of the experience of time when entered together in the same regression model [low-arousal, B = 0.094, ES = 0.027, β = 0.094, t = 3.457, p = 0.001, 95% CIs (0.041, 0.148), VIF = 1.015; high-arousal, B = 0.126, ES = 0.027, β = 0.126, t = 4.625, p < 0.0001, 95% CIs (0.073, 0.18), VIF = 1.015]. However, in the same way as for the negative emotions, the total variance explained in the time judgments remained low ( R = 0.15, R 2 = 0.022).

In sum, the slowing down of time felt by the participants was mainly linked to their level of happiness, which decreased during the lockdown. In other words, the changes in the time experience were better explained by a decrease in positive emotions than by an increase in negative emotions, suggesting that the participants in this study were not prey to a high level of negative emotion. In addition, among the negative emotions, only anxiety played a significant, although still minor, role in the experience of time during the lockdown.

Boredom, Activity, and Time Experience

Being housebound significantly increased the feeling of boredom [ M before = 1.95, SD before = 1.40, M lockdown = 2.93, SD lockdown = 1.89, F (1,1331) = 377.11, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.22], with fewer attention-demanding activities being carried out [ M before = 5.54, SD before = 1.47, M lockdown = 4.84, SD lockdown = 1.65, F (1,1331) = 255.89, p < 0.0001, η 2 p = 0.16] ( Figure 3 ). The boredom level was nevertheless lower in the present (now) ( M present = 2.50, SD present = 1.89) than when a longer period of lockdown was considered, F (1,1331) = 212.63, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.14, and when the activity performed in the present was slightly less attention-demanding [ M present = 4.76, SD present = 1.72, F (1,1331) = 4.43, p = 0.036, η 2 p = 0.003]. By contrast, the lockdown had little effect on the participants’ orientation toward the present compared to the past or the future [ M before = 4.32, SD before = 1.55, M lockdown = 4.57, SD lockdown = 4.57, F (1,1331) = 32.34, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.02].

Figure 3. Mean rating for boredom, attention on the activity being performed and being focused on the present for the periods before and during the lockdown.

The analyses of correlations ( Table 4 ) between the changes in the time experience and those relating to boredom and the activity showed that increased boredom and lack of activity were significantly associated with the feeling that time passed more slowly ( R = −43, R = 0.32, p < 0.0001). The regression analysis with boredom and activity in the same model revealed that these two factors contributed together to explaining the variance in the experience of time [ R = 0.46, R 2 = 0.21; B = −0.354, ES = 0.027, β = −0.354, t = −13.227, p < 0.0001, 95% CIs (−0.406, −0.301), VIF = 1.20; B = 0.179, ES = 0.027, β = 0.179, t = 6.697, p < 0.0001, 95% CIs (0.127, 0.231), VIF = 1.20].

In conclusion, these results revealed that the participants’ feeling of time dragging was highly related to the boredom and lack of activity induced by their lockdown at home.

Sleep, Daily Rhythm, and Time Experience

The participants also reported that they were sleeping a little less well during than before the lockdown [ M before = 4.81, SD before = 1.73, M lockdown = 4.46, SD lockdown = 1.83, F (1,1331) = 70.34, p < 0.0001, η 2 p = 0.05], and that their daily rhythm was less regular [ M before = 5.34, SD before = 1.71, M lockdown = 4.65, SD lockdown = 1.91, F (1,1331) = 159.35, p = 0.0001, η 2 p = 0.11] ( Figure 4 ). Those who reported sleeping less well during compared to before the lockdown also felt a slowing down of time ( R = 0.09, p < 0.01) ( Table 4 ). However, they also felt less happy ( R = 0.35), less calm ( R = 0.36), more angry ( R = −0.29), and more anxious ( R = −30) (all p < 0.0001). The regression analysis revealed that the sleep factor was not a reliable predictor of the time experience (B = 0.002, p = 0.96), irrespective of whether these emotions (happiness, low-arousal, anger, and fear) were entered together into the same equation or if only one emotion was added to the sleep factor in the regression model ( p > 0.10). The increase in the irregularity of the daily rhythm with the lockdown was also associated with changes in the time judgment ( R = 0.10, p < 0.01). However, this factor was also highly correlated with, in particular, the happiness and boredom levels ( R = 0.23, R = 0.22, p < 0.0001). When these two factors were added to the rhythm factor in the same linear regression model, rhythm also lost its predictive power ( B = −0.01, p = 0.69), while both happiness and boredom remained significant predictors ( p < 0.01).

Figure 4. Mean rating for sleep quality and rhythm of life for the periods before and during the lockdown.

Therefore, the results of this study did not suggest direct relationships between the time judgment and the self-reported changes in sleep quality and the regularity of the daily rhythm.

Models of Predictors of Time Experience

Our results, therefore, showed that the experience of time was highly sensitive to different self-reported feelings assessed in our survey. However, our statistical analyses suggested that boredom was the main predictor of changes in the time judgment. Boredom was nevertheless correlated with the activity performed during the lockdown as well as the emotion felt (happiness and anxiety) and the level of arousal experienced (low- and high-arousal), and all these factors were significant predictors of subjective time. As boredom is related to both activity and emotion, we tested two models to examine whether the activity and the emotion felt were mediating factors of the effect of boredom on the experience of time (Model 1 and 2, Figure 5 ). The emotion was characterized by its valence (happiness and anxiety) in the first model and by its level of arousal in the second model (low- and high-arousal). Figure 5 presents these three-way mediation models. The results of these models confirmed the significant direct effect of boredom on the time experience [ B = −0.336, ES = 0.0284, t = −11.808, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (−0.3913, −0.2798)]. There was nevertheless an indirect effect of activity [Boredom -> Activity -> Time, E = −0.0912, BootSE = 0.0203, BootCIs (−0.1318, −0.0524)], but this only slightly reduced the effect of boredom on the time judgment, accounting for about 20% of the total effect. Adding the emotions of happiness and anxiety and changing their place in the causal relationship did not change the results ( p > 0.05). The same result was found when arousal level rather than emotional valence was considered as a mediating factor (Model 2). A third mediation model (Model 3) confirmed that boredom mediated the effect of activity on the time judgment for a large proportion with a direct effect of activity of 0.17 ( p < 0.0001) for a total effect of 0.32 ( p < 0.0001). Moreover, the direct effect of happiness was no longer significant when boredom and the activity were included in the causal relationship between this emotion and the time judgment (Model 4) [ B = 0.02, ES = 0.0296, t = 0.6855, p = 0.49, 95% CIs (−0.037, 0.078)].

Figure 5. Mediation models for Study 1. Models 1 and 2 show the effect of boredom on time with emotions and activity as mediators. Model 3 shows the effect of activity on time with emotions as mediating factors. Model 4 shows the effect of happiness on time with activity and emotions as mediators.

In conclusion, our mediation models confirmed that it was mainly the boredom experienced during the lockdown, partly linked to the lack of activity, that led to the feeling that time slowed down during the lockdown compared to before it.

In conclusion, our results suggest that the living conditions during the lockdown and the individuals’ psychological characteristics that we tested did not play a significant role in the experience of time during the lockdown. The contextual effects of the lockdown on the time judgment were thus much stronger than the effects of individual traits. Indeed, the participants’ emotions were deeply disrupted by life in lockdown. The participants felt both less happy and aroused and more anxious, fearful, and angry. However, our results suggest that the feelings of fear and anger were not or only weakly associated with the experience of time during the lockdown. Finally, only the decrease in the feeling of happiness, and to a lesser extent the increase in that of anxiety, influenced the experience of time during the lockdown. However, our statistical analyses indicated that the effect of happiness on the time judgment was mediated by the increase of boredom and the lack of activity during the lockdown. In our study, the major factor that explained the feeling of a slowing down of time during the lockdown period was boredom (itself mediated to a small extent by the lack of activity).

However, in the literature, boredom does not only result from a lack of activity but also has an emotional dimension. It is indeed considered as a low-arousal negative emotion ( Eastwood et al., 2012 ). To verify the role of emotion in the effect of boredom on the feeling that time dragged during the lockdown, we conducted a second study with a new sample of participants. Indeed, the subject sample used in our first study was mainly composed of women and it is well known that both emotion perception and regulation (e.g., Bradley et al., 2001 ; Gross and John, 2003 ; Kret and De Gelder, 2012 ) and activity at home (e.g., child care and housekeeping) ( Kamp Dush et al., 2018 ) differ between women and men. A recent study suggested that women were more stressed at home than men during the lockdown ( Droit-Volet et al., 2020 ). In addition, as happiness and the activity performed played an important role in the time judgment in our first study, we added more specific questions on emotions: one on joy and the other on sadness, which, as positive and negative affects, can be considered as two independent unipolar factors (e.g., Tellegen et al., 1999 ). Indeed, being less happy does not necessary mean being sadder, i.e., to fall into sadness. We also added a question on the free time available for oneself in order to investigate whether having too much free time could be a source of boredom. Furthermore, we limited the number of psychological scales used to reduce the length of the survey to 30 min instead of 40 min.

Participants and Procedure

The aim of this study was to replicate and extend the results of Study 1 with another sample of participants. The survey was therefore the same and used the same questions though three additional questions were included, i.e., one each for joy, sadness, and the feeling of having free time for oneself. Two self-reported scales were also removed (SA-DHS and TAS) to reduce the survey duration to 30 min. The participants thus only completed the depression (BDI), the anxiety (S-STAI, α = 0.90) and the impulsivity scale (BIS 15, α = 0.79). The statistical analyses conducted were also similar to those used in Study 1.

This new sample was composed of 1116 people: 565 women and 551 men ( M age = 45.76, SD = 14.97; M Education years = 13.4, SD = 2.88) ( Table 1 ). They were recruited by a company (Easy panel) from 24 to 28 April (2020). As in Study 1, the participants gave their consent after reading the ethics form, which had been approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University Clermont Auvergne (IRB00011540-2020-31).

Figure 1 presents the time experience reported by the participants in this new study. The results were similar to those obtained in Study 1, with time judged to be passing more slowly during the lockdown ( M = 4.22, SD = 1.56) and in the present ( M = 4.28, SD = 1.44) than before the lockdown ( M = 5.28, SD = 1.32) [ F (1,1115) = 349.38, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.24; F (1,1115) = 358.30, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.24], with a slight difference between the time judgment during the lockdown and in the present [ F (1,1115) = 5.17, p < 0.02, η 2 p = 0.005]. An ANOVA with the lockdown period and participants’ sex as factors showed no main effect of sex ( F < 1). The interaction between participant’s sex and lockdown period nevertheless reached significance F (2,2228) = 3.24, p = 0.039, η 2 p = 0.003. However, this only suggested that time tended to pass faster for the women than for the men before the lockdown [5.39 vs. 5.16, F (1,1116) = 7.95, p = 0.005, η 2 p = 0.007], while no sex difference was observed during the lockdown (4.23 vs. 4.22, F s < 1). The difference between the subjective judgments of time before and during the lockdown (used in the subsequent analyses) also did not vary with the participants’ age ( R = 0.01, p = 0.70, Table 2 ). As in Study 1, the feeling of a slowing down of time with the lockdown merely tended to be more pronounced in participants with a lower level of education ( R = −0.10, p = 0.004).

In sum, the feeling that time slowed down during compared to before lockdown was a robust psychological phenomenon observed in both Study 1 and Study 2.

The results of this second study indicated that the time experience had little to do with the living conditions during lockdown ( Table 2 ). We observed only a small but significant correlation between the living space and the time experience ( R = −0.11, p < 0.0001), suggesting that time seemed to go slightly faster with more living space. In addition, the emotion expressed by the participants did not change with the living space (happiness, R = −0.05; sadness, R = 0.05; anger = 0.05; fear, R = −0.01; anxiety, R = −0.01; low-arousal, R = −0.004; high-arousal, R = −0.06, all p < 0.05). A significant but small correlation was observed only with boredom, R = 0.06, p = 0.047. The impression of time dragging also tended to be reduced in the people who defied the ban on going out ( R = −0.08, p = 0.004). Nevertheless, the levels of correlation remained low.

Our results thus confirm that the experience of time was little affected by the lockdown features.

The analyses of correlations between the subjective experience of time and the scores on the self-reported scales ( Table 3 ) confirmed that the feeling of time fluctuated only slightly, although significantly, with the scores of depression ( R = 0.08, p < 0.01) and anxiety ( R = 0.13, p < 0.01). In Study 2, we also observed a small correlation between the individual level of impulsivity and the judgment of the PoT ( R = −0.09, p < 0.01), a finding not observed in Study 1. No difference between the women and the men was observed for the depression and the impulsivity scores ( F s < 1), while the women reported being slightly more anxious than the men [13.5 vs. 12.31, F (1,1049) = 18.69, p < 0.0001, η 2 p = 0.007]. However, the effect size was not significant. The statistical regression analyses with the depression, anxiety, and impulsivity scores as factors suggested that only anxiety [ B = 0.126, ES = 0.035, β = 0.127, t = 3.59, p < 0.0001, 95% CIs (0.057, 0.195), VIF = 1.33], and impulsivity [ B = −0.128, ES = 0.031, β = 0.128, t = −4.07, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (−0.189, −0.066), VIF = 1.048] were reliable predictors of the time experience. The assessed level of depression lost its predictive power [ B = .037, ES = .035, β = .038, t = 1.059, p = .29, 95% CIs (−.032,.107), VIF = 1.34].

In sum, the more anxious and impulsive the participants were, the longer time seemed to drag on during the lockdown period. However, these relationships were rather weak in terms of shared variance Psychological traits has therefore little effect on PoT judgment relative to the contextual effects of living in lockdown.

As in Study 1, Study 2 showed that the lockdown had a major influence on affects. The participants indeed reported feeling less positive emotions and more negative emotions. In particular, they felt less happy [ M before = 4.95, SD before = 1.26, M lockdown = 4.11, SD lockdown = 1.48, F (1,1115) = 425.29, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.28] and joyful [ M before = 4.79, SD before = 1.33, M lockdown = 3.88, SD lockdown = 1.45, F (1,1115) = 474.36, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.30]. Conversely, they felt sadder [ M before = 2.73, SD before = 1.46, M lockdown = 3.28, SD lockdown = 1.64, F (1,1115) = 137.86, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.11], more angry [ M before = 2.79, SD before = 1.49, M lockdown = 3.54, SD lockdown = 1.83, F (1,1115) = 194.23, p > 0.001, η 2 p = 0.15], more fearful [ M before = 2.62, SD before = 1.49, M lockdown = 3.90, SD lockdown = 1.78, F (1,1115) = 623.18, p < 0.0001, η 2 p = 0.36], and more anxious [ M before = 3.22, SD before = 1.59, M lockdown = 3.90, SD lockdown = 1.75, F (1,1115) = 198.55, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.15]. Their level of arousal also decreased during the lockdown [low-arousal: M before = 4.20, SD before = 1.43, M lockdown = 3.80, SD lockdown = 1.54, F (1,1115) = 64.24, p < 0.0001, η 2 p = 0.05; high-arousal: M before = 3.66, SD before = 1.58, M lockdown = 3.26, SD lockdown = 1.59, F (1,1115) = 68.90, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.06]. The effect of the participants’ sex on the differences between the emotion ratings before and during the lockdown was not significant ( Fs < 1), with the exception of the feeling of fear, which tended to be higher in women than in men [-0.097 vs. 0.0999, F (1,1114) = 10.98, p = 0.001, η 2 p = 0.01].

Table 4 , which presents the correlations between the before-during lockdown differences in the experience of time and the emotions felt, confirms the high sensitivity of time judgments to the emotions felt. The time experience varied with all the reported emotions (all R s ≥ 0.15, p < 0.01). To try to identify the best predictors of the experience of time within each emotion category (positive and negative), we ran two hierarchical linear regression analyses ( Table 5 ), one with the two positive emotions (happiness and joy) and the other with the four negative emotions (sadness, anger, fear, and anxiety). The answers to the questions on emotional arousal (low- and high-arousal) were also included in the same hierarchical regression analysis. These regression analyses revealed that each specific emotion contributed significantly to explaining a proportion of inter-individual differences in the experience of time (all p s < 0.01). The only non-significant emotion was the level of fear (β = 0.0001, t = −0.001, p = 0.99). Therefore, in line with the results of Study 1, the feeling of fear, which increased during the lockdown, did not explain the changes in the experience of time. Furthermore, happiness explained the largest proportion of the variance in the judgment of time, with the decrease in happiness during the lockdown appearing to be the most reliable emotional predictor of the feeling of time slowing down [ B = 0.39, ES = 0.03, β = 0.39, t = −14.06, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (0.33, 0.44), VIF = 1, R 2 = 0.15]. The negative emotions (sadness, anger, and anxiety) also played a significant role but the part of variance explained by the various negative emotions was similar (between 8 and 10%) when each emotion was entered first into the equation (sadness, R = 0.29, R 2 = 0.084; Anxiety, R = 0.29, R 2 = 0.085, Anger, R = 308, R 2 = 0.095), with a Δ of 4% when the other negative emotions were added into the equation. Finally, although the third regression model, which included the level of arousal, was significant, it only explained 6–7% of the variance in time judgment ( Table 5 ).

Table 5. Hierarchical regression analyses on the passage-of-time judgment when the positive emotions, the negative emotions, or the arousal levels were considered in each model.

In sum, unlike in Study 1, in Study 2, fear, happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety seemed to be significant predictors of changes in the judgment of time during the lockdown, although happiness was the best of these. The pattern of the emotions and their links to the time judgment was thus more complex in this second study than in the first one.

Boredom, Activity, Present-Focus, Free Time for Oneself, and Time Experience

As shown in Figure 3 , boredom was greater during ( M = 3.45, SD = 1.8) than before the lockdown ( M = 2.45, SD = 1.48), F (1,1115) = 331.93, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.23, with fewer attention-demanding activities being carried out [ M lockdown = 4.26, SD lockdown = 1.57, M before = 4.78, SD before = 1.58, F (1,1115) = 103.06, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.09]. The participants also considered that they had more time for themselves [ M lockdown = 4.66, SD lockdown = 1.69, M before = 4.24, SD before = 1.63, F (1,1115) = 45.88, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.04], and that they tended to be more focused on the present [ M lockdown = 4.66, SD lockdown = 1.51, M before = 4.54, SD before = 1.34, F (1,1115) = 8.42, p = 0.004, η 2 p = 0.007]. However, as suggested by the effect size of the significant results, only increased boredom represented a major consequence of the lockdown. No effect of participants’ sex was observed on these different dimensions (all p s > 0.05), except that the women estimated that they had a little more time for themselves during than before the lockdown than the men did. However, the sex-related difference was also small [−0.065 vs. 0.06, F (1,1115) = 4.82, p = 0.03, η 2 p = 0.004].

Table 4 shows the correlations between these factors (boredom, activity, present-focus, free time) and the time experience. The correlation results confirm the close link between the changes in the time experience and the decrease in boredom ( R = −45, p < 0.0001) and the activity performed ( R = 0.27, p < 0.0001). The judgment of time was surprisingly very slightly linked to the feeling of having more free time for oneself ( R = 0.06, p = 0.046) and not at all linked to the fact of being more focused on the present ( R = 0.02, p = 0.53). The regression model with the three significant factors (boredom, activity, and free time) indicated that only boredom and the activity significantly predicted the individual differences in the experience of time [ B = −0.41, ES = 0.028, β = −0.42, t = −14.36, p < 0.0001, 95% CIs (−0.46, −0.35), VIF = 1.129; B = −0.131, ES = 0.029, β = 0.13, t = 4.48, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (−0.074, 0.188), VIF = 1.21, respectively]. The fact of having time free for oneself was no longer significant [ B = 0.018, ES = 0.028, β = 0.018, t = 0.66, p = 0.51, 95% CIs(−0.036, 0.072), VIF = 1.082]. However, the hierarchical linear regression indicated that boredom explained the greatest proportion of variance in the time judgment, i.e., 20% ( R = 0.448, R 2 = 0.201), and the Δ was only 0.016% when the activity was added as a factor ( R = 0.466, R 2 = 0.217).

In sum, this second study confirmed the major role of boredom in the experience of time during the lockdown.

The second study confirmed that the quality of sleep was worse during than before the lockdown [ M lockdown = 4.19, SD lockdown = 1.78, M before = 4.65, SD before = 1.68, F (1,1115) = 103.32, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.09]. The people who reported worse sleep also described time as passing particularly slowly during the lockdown ( R = 0.32, p < 0.0001). The participants also described a less regular rhythm of life during compared to before the lockdown [ M lockdown = 4.52, SD lockdown = 1.77, M before = 5.24, SD before = 1.52, F (1,1115) = 181.04, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.14]. Furthermore, the more irregular their life was, the more they expressed a slowing down of time ( R = 0.26, p < 0.0001). As in Study 1, the self-reported level of sleep was associated with an increase in the negative emotions and a decrease in the level of arousal ( Table 4 ). However, contrary to Study 1, when we included the sleep factor and the other emotional factors in the same regression model, sleep remained a significant predictor of inter-individual differences in the time judgment ( p < 0.001).

Therefore, both the decrease in sleep quality and the increase in the irregularity of the life rhythm played a more important role in the time judgment during the lockdown in our second study than was not observed in the first one using another population with the majority of participants completing the survey a little earlier in the lockdown period.

The Models of Predictors of the Time Experience

Boredom ( figure 6 ).

The statistical results of our second study therefore confirmed that boredom was the major factor explaining the feeling of a slowing down of time during the lockdown compared to before. As indicated by the mediation analyses ( Figure 6B ), boredom mediated the significant effect of each emotion (happiness, sadness anger, and anxiety) on the time judgment as well as that of sleep and daily rhythm. It accounted for between 39 and 48.5% of the total effect of each factor on the time judgment ( p < 0.01). It also mediated the relationship between the decreased level of arousal and the time judgment ( p < 0.01) ( Figure 6 ). However, the time judgment was only weakly linked to the levels of arousal (high and low) (see above), and the levels of arousal did not mediate (or did so only to a very small extent) the significant observed effects of the other factors on the time judgment. It was therefore removed from the subsequent analyses. Moreover, the direct effect of boredom on the time judgment remained highly significant even when other mediating factors were entered into the mediation model (Model 1, Figure 6A ) [direct effect = −0.31, SE = 0.297, t = −10.27, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (−0.36, −0.25)]. The addition of other factors did not significantly change the direct effect of boredom on the time judgment. The mediation analyses therefore confirmed the main role of boredom in the feeling of a slowing of time during the lockdown.

Figure 6. (A) Boredom mediation models for Study 2. Model (A) shows a mediation model of the effect of boredom on time with activity, sleep and happiness as mediators. Model (B) shows mediation models for the effect of each emotion on time with boredom as a mediating factor.

However, as suggested by the mediation model 1 ( Figure 6A ), the effect of boredom was significantly mediated by the activity performed during the lockdown [Boredom -> Activity -> Time, Effect = −0.0257, BootSE = 0.0117, BootCIs (−0.0499, −0.0037)], and the quality of sleep [Boredom -> Sleep -> Time, Effect = −0.0384, BootSE = 0.0101, BootCIs (−0.0594, −0.0204)]. In addition, contrary to the results found in Study 1, the mediation analyses revealed that the emotion of happiness was also a significant mediator of the relationship between boredom and the time experience [Boredom -> Happiness -> Time, Effect = −0.0533, BootSE = 0.0133, BootCIs (−0.0818, −0.0288)]. The indirect effect of these factors (activity, sleep, and happiness) accounted for 32% of the total effect of boredom on the time judgment (total of indirect effects = −0.1461, BootSE = 0.0219, BootCIs [−0.1893, −0.1039]). Adding the daily rhythm to the model did not significantly change the mediation percentage [total indirect effects = −0.1573, BootSE = 0.0239, BootCIs (−0.2048, −0.1111)]. Indeed, as described below, the temporal effect of the daily rhythm was mediated both by the sleep difficulties encountered by the participants during the lockdown and their boredom, partly linked to the lack of activity. Similarly, the addition of anxiety and other emotions to the mediation model did not increase the proportion of the explained effect.

In sum, the results of our second study confirmed that boredom mainly accounted for the changes in subjective time during the lockdown, although boredom was mediated only partly by the lack of activity, the emotional state (decreased happiness) and, to a lesser extent, the decrease in sleep quality.

However, as indicated above, and contrary to what was suggested in Study 1, the sensation of time slowing down did not simply result from boredom. The emotional states induced by the lockdown, as well as the quality of sleep and the daily rhythm, partly explained the role of boredom in the subjective slowing down of time. Consequently, despite the significant indirect effect of boredom, the direct effect of other factors remained significant ( Figure 6 all p < 0.01). We therefore examined the relevance of other factors (emotion, sleep, and daily rhythm) for the time judgment.

Emotion ( Figure 7 )

Among the relevant emotion-related factors, the feeling of decreased happiness during the lockdown appeared to be the most reliable predictor of the time experience. Indeed, the effect of other emotional factors on the time judgment was systematically mediated by the decreased happiness (all p < 0.0001). However, happiness was also mediated by boredom. We therefore tested a complete mediation model (Model 2, Figure 7 ), which included sadness, anxiety, sleep quality, and boredom as mediating variables (adding a factor or substituting a factor by another factor did not change or even reduce the percentage of indirect effect). This model indicates that sadness per se was not a significant mediator of the effect of happiness on the subjective experience of time [Happiness -> Sadness -> Time, Effect = −0.0164, BootSE = 0.0198 BootCIs (−0.0543, 0.0236)]. In the self-assessments of their feelings during the lockdown, the participants therefore did not directly associate a decrease in their feeling of happiness with an increase in sadness. In the same way as sadness, anxiety was not a significant mediator [Happiness -> Anxiety -> Time, Effect = 0.0105, BootSE = 0.0066 BootCIs (−0.0015, 0.0247)]. Boredom and sleep quality on their own accounted for 46 % of the total effect of decreased happiness on the subjective slowing down of time during the lockdown [i.e., 18% of the total of the indirect effects of model 2, E = 0.2056, BootSE = 0.0285, BootCIs (−0.1506, 0.2617)]. Nevertheless, the direct effect of happiness remained significant (direct effect of happiness = 0.1823, SE = 0.0323, t = 5.64, p < 0.001 95% CIs [0.1190, 0.2457]. In sum, the results of Study 2 showed that decreased happiness was a major emotional factor, which went some way to explaining the participants’ experience of time during the lockdown.

Figure 7. Emotion mediation models for Study 2. Models of mediation for the effect of emotions on time: Model 2, Happiness; Model 3, Sadness; Model 4, Anxiety; Model 5, Anger.

While happiness remained a significant predictor of changes in time judgment during the lockdown, sadness lost its predictive power when sleep difficulties, boredom, and decreased happiness were used as mediating variables [direct effect of sadness = 0.002, SE = 0.0317, t = 0.0522, p = 0.95, 95% CIs (−0.0605, 0.0638)] ( Figure 7 , model 3). The same results were found for anxiety [direction effect of anxiety = −0.05, SE = 0.0296, t = −1.81, p = 0.07, 95% CIs (−0.1116, 0.0044)] ( Figure 7 , model 4). With a similar model ( Figure 7 , model 5), anger kept its power to predict the time judgment but at a low level, i.e., 29% of the total effect [direct effect of anger = −0.0911, SE = 0.0306, t = −2.98, p = 0.003, 95% CIs (−0.1511, −0.0311)]. Furthermore, anxiety did not mediate the effect of anger on the time judgment [Anger -> Anxiety -> Time, Effect = −0.0106, BootSE = 0.0188, BootCIs (−0.0470, 0.0261)], or indeed that of happiness or of another emotion once boredom, in particular, was included in the mediation model. Therefore, the increase in both the sadness and the anxiety induced by the lockdown did not directly contribute to changes in the time judgment during the lockdown. By contrast, anger contributed to it, albeit at a very low level.

In sum, negative emotions (sadness, anger, fear, and anxiety) experienced during the lockdown had not or few effects on the experience of a slowing of time during lockdown. Only a decrease in the level of happiness played an important role, mediated in part by boredom and sleep disruption caused by the lockdown.

Sleep, daily rhythm ( Figure 8 )

Finally, the sleep difficulties encountered by the participants during the lockdown played an important role in the experience of time during this period. The direct effect of this sleep-related factor was preserved in the different mediation models ( Figure 8 , model 6) [direct effect of sleep = 0.1299, SE = 0.0291, t = 4.46, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (0.0728, 0.1870)], even though its predictive level was lower than those observed for boredom and happiness. As observed above, in the mediation model tested, anxiety once again did not play a significant role in the sleep effect on the time judgment [Sleep -> Anxiety -> Time, Effect = −0.0189, BootSE = 0.0120, BootCIs (−0.0041, 0.0434)]. However, the daily rhythm, boredom, and decreased happiness were significant mediators of the sleep effect on the feeling of time dragging during the lockdown [Sleep -> Rhythm -> Time, Effect = −0.0284, BootSE = 0.0119, BootCIs (0.0062, 0.0533); Sleep -> Boredom -> Time, Effect = 0.0383, BootSE = 0.0121, BootCIs (0.0167, 0.0636); Sleep -> Happiness -> Time, Effect = 0.0265, BootSE = 0.0086, BootCIs (0.0114, 0.0451)], with the result that their combined effects accounted for 59.62% of the total effect of sleep quality on the time judgment (model 6) [total of indirect effects = 0.1918, BootSE = 0.0243, BootCIs (0.1446, 0.2412), t = 4.46, p < 0.001, 95% CIs (0.0728, 0.1870)]. Nevertheless, as noted immediately above, the direct effect of the sleep factor remained significant.

Figure 8. Sleep and daily-rhythm mediation models for Study 2. Model 6 shows the effect of sleep and model 7 that of rhythm of life on time.

Although the daily rhythm also influenced the assessment of the PoT during the lockdown, its effect was largely mediated by the sleep difficulties encountered by the participants associated with their boredom and their decreased happiness. A total of 65.38% of the effect of the daily rhythm on the time judgment was indeed mediated by these factors [total indirect effects = 0.17, BootSE = 0.0209, BootCIs (0.1318, 0.2127)]. However, the unstructured rhythm of life during the lockdown continued to account for a small part of the inter-individual differences in the time judgment, as indicated by the significant direct effect of the daily rhythm [direct effect of the daily rhythm = 0.09, SE = 0.0277, t = 3.32, p = 0.001, 95% CIs (0.0376, 0.1462)]. The addition of the activity as a mediating variable did not change the results of the equation.

In sum, difficulty sleeping and, to a lesser extent, the irregularity of the daily rhythm partly explained the feeling of time dragging during the lockdown.

In conclusion, the different mediation models conducted in Study 2 clearly indicated that three factors had indirect and direct effects on the feeling of a slowing down of time during lockdown compared to before, which were boredom, decreased happiness, and sleep difficulties, although the main factor was boredom.

General Discussion

During the exceptional period of the Covid-19 epidemic, when people were forced to remain confined to their homes, we conducted two surveys in France with two large samples of over 1000 participants each. This makes it possible to verify the replication of the results and their robustness from one study to the next, in which a different sample was used. Both samples were tested over the same time period (i.e., April 2020), although the second survey was completed later (between 24 and 28 April for Study 2 and between 1 and 29 April for Study 1). It would also have been interesting to examine changes in participants’ responses over the entire lockdown period and/or at two distinct moments of the lockdown. In addition, although the results were fairly straightforward in showing the major role of boredom in time judgment, the use of mediation models in cross-sectional data should be used with caution ( O’Laughlin et al., 2018 ). An interest of our study lies in having questioned the participants on their feeling and behaviors before the lockdown. It would have been, however, preferable, although impossible here, to have their initial ratings outside the lockdown period rather than retrospective responses. Interviewing the same people at another time period would therefore be important to confirm our results.

The results of our two surveys nevertheless clearly showed that the lockdown greatly disrupted the participants’ life events and their emotions. The main consequence of these changes was that the participants’ relationship to time was altered: Time seemed to pass far more slowly compared to before the lockdown. This feeling of a slowing down of time with the lockdown is a robust psychological phenomenon reported in all the international studies on the time judgment conducted during the lockdown ( Cellini et al., 2020 ; Droit-Volet et al., 2020 ; Ogden, 2020 ; Torboli et al., 2020 ). However, the present studies investigating a large series of factors allowed us to identify the main causes of these changes in the subjective experience of time with the lockdown.

With regard to the living conditions during the lockdown (e.g., number of confined people, living space), contrary to what one might have thought, our studies showed that they had little or no significant influence on the sensation of time. Indeed, only in one study (Study 2) did time tend to drag when the living space was limited, whereas no such finding was observed in the other one (Study 1). Moreover, the results showed a significant but weak correlation between the available space and the level of boredom. Furthermore, the average area of the place of confinement for the participants was close in the second and the first study, and a significant effect was observed only in the former. The inconsistency of the results between the studies and the weakness of the effect suggests that it is not the space per se that really plays a role in the experience of time but what people do in this space and the emotion experienced by the person living in it. Writing, reading, and watching a good movie with your children all require little space. And one can be unhappy and bored on a large deserted island even if the sun is shining.

The participants reported multiple changes in their emotional states produced by the lockdown as well as by the associated context involving the spread of the virus. They were indeed overwhelmed by various negative emotions. They expressed fear and anxiety. They also described more anger and felt sadder and less happy than before the lockdown. Although most of these negative emotions are categorized as high-arousal emotions ( Russell, 1980 ) (i.e., fear, anxiety, and anger), they were associated in our studies with a decrease in the level of arousal. The participants reported being calmer, more relaxed, and less stimulated/excited/awake during than before the lockdown. The general low arousal level described by the participants suggests that the emotions they reported corresponded more to a mood rather than to an emotion per se . Mood differs from emotion and is defined as an emotional state of moderate intensity (i.e., low arousal) that persists in time outside of the event or stimulus that triggered the emotion (e.g., Izard, 1991 ; Watson and Clark, 1994 ). In our studies, the participants thus reported an evaluative mental state that persisted over time during the lockdown period. The potential risk of the lockdown may therefore lie in the development of affective psychological disorders. It would be interesting to carry out a survey in a few months to check whether the disruption of affective states due to the Covid-19 crisis persists or not in order to evaluate the clinical consequences and to consider treatments and solutions. Nonetheless, the emotion scores assessed in our study remained quite low, being lower than 4 points on a seven-point rating scale. This suggests that the majority of our participants did not fall into an extreme negative affective state. Consistently with this, the considerable decrease in happiness that the participants experienced with the lockdown was not related to the increase in sadness, with this latter remaining low. Moreover, the effect of decreased happiness on the time judgment was not mediated by the increase in sadness. Nevertheless, our data indicated that the decrease in the feeling of being happy in the context of lockdown was greater in the participants with higher anxiety, depression, and impulsivity scores. But, the results of the two studies were not consistent for these two clinical dimensions. They suggest, however, that some people may suffer emotionally from the lockdown more than others due to their psychological vulnerability (Martinelli et al., unpublished).

Despite the upheaval of mood induced by the lockdown, our studies showed that few emotions directly affected the temporal experience. Indeed, the increase in the feeling of fear during lockdown was not associated with any changes in the subjective judgment of time. Similarly, the anxiety scores were not related to variations in the time judgment. And when a significant correlation with the time judgment was observed, it was mediated by other factors, namely boredom and decreased happiness (model 4, Figure 7 ). This is entirely consistent with the results of the study on time and Covid-19 conducted by Droit-Volet et al. (2020) showing that the time experience was not related to perceived stress about the virus and the disease or the perceived stress at home or work. In fact, the feeling of a slowing down of time during the lockdown was mainly related to the feeling of happiness. The happier people feel the faster time flies by. The participants felt unhappy during the lockdown and time therefore seemed to pass very slowly. This provides further evidence that the feeling of the PoT results from the participants’ introspective analyses of their internal emotional states ( Droit-Volet et al., 2018b ; Droit-Volet and Dambrun, 2019 ).

Our study therefore showed that the decrease in the individual levels of happiness explained the changes in the experience of time. However, these emotional changes did not constitute the main factor underlying the feeling of a slowing down of time during the lockdown. That factor was boredom. Indeed, the two studies presented in this manuscript systematically showed the significant relationship between boredom and the feeling of a slowing down of time. Our statistical mediation analyses indicated that the activity performed and the level of happiness mediated the effect of boredom on time judgment, although to a lesser extent in the case of the latter. Therefore, because individuals performed only a few activities that occupied their attention, they tended to get bored and time dragged on. This is consistent with the attentional model of timing ( Zakay, 1989 ; Block and Zakay, 1996 ; Zakay and Block, 1996 ) and the results of numerous studies using a dual-task paradigm. According to these, time judgment directly depends on the amount of attention allocated to timing ( Nobre and Coull, 2010 ). The more attentional resources the task being performed consumes, the more its duration is underestimated. Attentional mechanisms, related to the amount of activity that fills the time period to be estimated and the resulting feeling of boredom, would therefore underlie the subjective experience of time during lockdown. This provides support for Larson’s model of the critical role of occupational activity in the estimation of the speed of the PoT ( Larson, 2004 ; Larson and von Eye, 2006 ). However, the emotion of happiness also played a significant role in the effect of boredom on the experience of time. Without further investigation, however, it is difficult to identify the mechanisms involved in the mediating role of happiness on the effect of boredom on the time judgment. It is likely that the feeling of happiness also involves attention mechanisms. For example, Droit-Volet et al. (2018a) showed that the practice of meditation exercises, when the participants were trained to focus their attention on different parts of their body (body scan) or breathing rhythm, both increased the feeling of happiness and produced an underestimation of time, with the feeling that time flies by. Consequently, the feeling of happiness per se may also depend on the orientation of the attentional focus toward activity, which in turn affects the time judgment. In sum, attention mechanisms could also be involved in the mediating effect of happiness on the boredom–time relationship.

Our studies showed that boredom was therefore the best predictor of feelings about the speed of time during lockdown. Although the concept of boredom has long been a subject of academic study, it is a complex emotion that has been neglected and under-investigated experimentally ( Smith, 1981 ; Pekrun et al., 2010 ; van Hooft and van Hooff, 2018 ). The boredom-related processes that monitor temporal experiences therefore remain unclear ( Zakay, 2014 ; Jokic et al., 2018 ; Witowska et al., 2020 ). Our study revealed that the effect of boredom on the temporal experience was partially mediated by the lack of activity and the decrease in happiness. However, our study also showed that boredom was not reduced to the effect of these two factors, as is indicated by the significant direct effect of boredom on the time judgment in the mediation models. Studies on perceptual deprivation have shown that humans need meaningful information ( Merhabian, 1977 ). The lockdown situation could thus be also a poor and monotonous environment, as it is devoid of the successive events that usually fill the day and time.

The participants in our studies also reported that the rhythm of the days under lockdown was less regular than usual and, more importantly, that they found it more difficult to sleep during the lockdown than before it. Furthermore, it appears that sleep quality was significantly correlated with subjective time: The better people slept during the lockdown the faster time passed. What is more, our data suggested that sleep deregulation, related to the irregular life rhythm during the lockdown, was also a significant mediator of the effect of boredom on the slowing down of time during the lockdown. However, the significant sleep–time relationship was found in our second study but not in the first one. This can be explained by the fact that we tested two different populations in our study at slightly different moments during the lockdown, i.e., the latter for the second study. The link between sleep and PoT judgment must therefore be confirmed in future studies.

During the lockdown imposed by the government due to the spread of Covid-19, the participants experienced a slowing down of time that was mainly explained by the sense of boredom which overwhelmed them, partly due to a lack of activity, some sleeping difficulties, and the relative negative feeling of being less happy. However, the participants reported that they had more time for themselves and that they were more calm and relaxed. They were nevertheless little focused on the present, i.e., with little propensity to concentrate on positive thoughts and bodily sensations related to the self ( Fenigstein et al., 1975 ). It is possible that anxiety and uncertainty, especially about the time when lockdown would end, might have prevented them from focusing on the simple pleasures of the present moment and trying to find interesting activities. Being master of one’s time—that is, forgetting it and making it fly past—requires practice. The lockdown was too brutal. It was not prepared and organized by the people, and, in our industrial society, we have lost our autonomous control—our mastery of our time. We need time to conquer our time.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, upon request.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University Clermont Auvergne (IRB00011540-2020-31). The ethics committee waived the requirement of written informed consent for participation.

Author Contributions

NM, SG, CB, PH, and SD-V conceived the survey. NM collected the data, analyzed the data, and drafted the manuscript. SG and SD-V analyzed the data and drafted the manuscript. JC analyzed the data. CB, GD, JC, and PH provided critical revisions and approved the final version of the manuscript. PH and SD-V secured funding for the study. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the French ANR (ANR-Flash Covid-19).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : Covid-19, lockdown, time, emotion, boredom, sleep

Citation: Martinelli N, Gil S, Belletier C, Chevalère J, Dezecache G, Huguet P and Droit-Volet S (2021) Time and Emotion During Lockdown and the Covid-19 Epidemic: Determinants of Our Experience of Time? Front. Psychol. 11:616169. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616169

Received: 11 October 2020; Accepted: 03 December 2020; Published: 06 January 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 Martinelli, Gil, Belletier, Chevalère, Dezecache, Huguet and Droit-Volet. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Sylvie Droit-Volet, [email protected]

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• Research article
• Open access
• Published: 02 June 2021

How do you feel during the COVID-19 pandemic? A survey using psychological and linguistic self-report measures, and machine learning to investigate mental health, subjective experience, personality, and behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic among university students

• Cornelia Herbert   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9652-5586 1 ,
• Alia El Bolock 1 , 2 &
• Slim Abdennadher 2  

BMC Psychology volume  9 , Article number:  90 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The WHO has raised concerns about the psychological consequences of the current COVID-19 pandemic, negatively affecting health across societies, cultures and age-groups.

This online survey study investigated mental health, subjective experience, and behaviour (health, learning/teaching) among university students studying in Egypt or Germany shortly after the first pandemic lockdown in May 2020. Psychological assessment included stable personality traits, self-concept and state-like psychological variables related to (a) mental health (depression, anxiety), (b) pandemic threat perception (feelings during the pandemic, perceived difficulties in describing, identifying, expressing emotions), (c) health (e.g., worries about health, bodily symptoms) and behaviour including perceived difficulties in learning. Assessment methods comprised self-report questions, standardized psychological scales, psychological questionnaires, and linguistic self-report measures. Data analysis comprised descriptive analysis of mental health, linguistic analysis of self-concept, personality and feelings, as well as correlational analysis and machine learning. N = 220 (107 women, 112 men, 1 = other) studying in Egypt or Germany provided answers to all psychological questionnaires and survey items.

Mean state and trait anxiety scores were significantly above the cut off scores that distinguish between high versus low anxious subjects. Depressive symptoms were reported by 51.82% of the student sample, the mean score was significantly above the screening cut off score for risk of depression. Worries about health (mental and physical health) and perceived difficulties in identifying feelings, and difficulties in learning behaviour relative to before the pandemic were also significant. No negative self-concept was found in the linguistic descriptions of the participants, whereas linguistic descriptions of feelings during the pandemic revealed a negativity bias in emotion perception. Machine learning (exploratory) predicted personality from the self-report data suggesting relations between personality and subjective experience that were not captured by descriptive or correlative data analytics alone.

Despite small sample sizes, this multimethod survey provides important insight into mental health of university students studying in Egypt or Germany and how they perceived the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in May 2020. The results should be continued with larger samples to help develop psychological interventions that support university students across countries and cultures to stay psychologically resilient during the pandemic.

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Only in a few month, the COVID-19 epidemic developed into a serious pandemic affecting all countries around the globe. Physical and social distancing and global lockdown of public, social, and work life was and still is a necessity in many countries to fight the pandemic without vaccine. Scientific progress in understanding the behaviour of the virus has grown rapidly since the outbreak of the pandemic, while scientific understanding of the psychological consequences of the pandemic is still at a developing stage. Empirical studies investigating mental health, well-being, subjective experience and behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic are currently underway and several survey studies from several countries have meanwhile been published. First published surveys investigated the mental health of Covid-19 survivors or of health care professionals enrolled in the treatment of COVID-19 patients [ 1 , 2 ]. Moreover, first observations from surveys investigating psychological reactions of the general population in the hot spot countries immediately after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have meanwhile been published e.g., [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. The results suggest a significant increase in mental ill health among populations during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting earlier observations from previous epi- and pandemics [ 6 ]. The World Health Organization (WHO) expects mental health burdens in the general population to be particularly pronounced in people who have already been at risk of or suffering from affective disorders before the pandemic (see for an overview [ 7 , 8 ]). Similarly, patients in general as well as patients with a chronic mental disorder in particular, are expected to suffer from impairments in mental health and well-being due to their medical and psychotherapeutic treatment being reduced or cancelled as a consequence of the pandemic lockdown [ 8 ]. In addition, health care professionals involved in the treatment of COVID-19 patients as well as workers with system-relevant jobs are supposed to be at special risk of developing stress-related symptoms and diseases such as post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic fatigue, anxiety, and depressive disorder [ 1 , 2 , 8 ].

However, the current COVID-19 pandemic is not just threatening specific parts of the population. On the contrary. The spread of the virus around the world, its exponential increase in infection probability, and its high lethality bear constant threats for whole societies and for each individual as the pandemic is still evident now, one year after the pandemic outbreak.

Therefore, according to the WHO, primary mental health prevention targeting either the general public or specific population groups should be an indispensable goal of crisis management of the current COVID-19 pandemic [ 8 ] comprising all age-groups from youth, adolescence to adulthood.

Notably, fighting the COVID-19 pandemic currently still requires behaviour change in everybody including daily behaviour (work, business, family, and leisure) as well as changes in health behaviour and social behaviour. In each country so far, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns affected daily behaviour routines including work, business, family, and leisure time activities. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns started in China in January 2020 and only a few months later, lockdowns followed in many countries around the globe including Germany and Egypt in March 2020. Crucially, in all countries, the first lockdowns came by far and large unexpected to the population. The restrictions in daily life and behaviour may therefore not be tolerated equally well by everybody. Accordingly, health care professionals and the WHO have suggested that counseling programs supporting and assisting people in behaviour change need to become part of the COVID-19 pandemic prevention initiatives [ 8 , 9 ] to avoid unnecessary mental health burdens in the general public.

However, in order to successfully support mental health, well-being, and behaviour in those social domains of life most seriously affected by the current COVID-19 pandemic, a better scientific understanding is required of how individual people experience and psychologically react to the current COVID-19 pandemic, how they think, feel, suffer and cope with the situation, and how they are handling threat perception, how they perceive and regulate emotions and behaviour [ 10 ].

Academia and education are two social and public domains that have been seriously affected by the pandemic lockdown in every country. Concerning Germany, in March 2020 the different states of Germany decided to postpone all academic teaching at higher education institutions to an indefinite period. The universities’ infrastructure including libraries were closed and students were not allowed to come to the university. Similarly, concerning Egypt, public and private universities responded in a similar manner as mandated by the government by closing the campus for students and switching all teaching activities to e-learning. Teaching courses including classes, laboratory courses, seminars, preparatory and induction courses were suspended for the summer term 2020. Teaching during the summer term was announced to be offered as online e-learning format. The lockdown situation in the two countries was thus almost identical for university students concerning the aspects of their social and academic life.

Working at home without any possibility of coming to the university campus and not being able of attending to lectures and courses face-to-face together with peers, tutors, and teachers require from students to learn and adapt to new behaviour rules. Psychologically, pandemics increase uncertainty [ 11 ]. Uncertainty causes stress and increases the risk for mental ill health if it conflicts with behaviour routines and habits [ 11 ]. Despite most of the students being digital natives, the abrupt switch from face-to-face communication to digital, computer-assisted forms of teaching and sole reliance on digital interaction as the only means of social interaction might not be tolerated mentally and physically equally well by all students. Whether the current pandemic situation and its consequences are experienced as a threat may depend on the students’ individual character, i.e., the student’s personality and self-concept as well as his/her current cognitive, affective, and motivational state.

Recent observations from published survey studies among Chinese students after the lockdown reported an increase in general anxiety within about 25% of the student participants. Anxiety symptoms ranged from mild to moderate to severe anxiety [ 3 ]. Moreover, pandemic self-isolation was found to be associated with complex patterns of psychopathology amongst students including an increase in symptoms of obsessive–compulsive disorder, hypochondria, depression, and neurasthenia [ 4 ]. Meanwhile published survey studies from several countries in Europe and across the world support negative changes in mental health among university students immediately after the first lockdowns in 2020, specifically in relation with quarantine and self-isolation [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ].

Nationwide surveys conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic already reported elevated mental health problems and stress-related symptoms including anxiety and depression among university students [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ], and this, although university students across countries might belong to the young educated low-risk population. In a recent online study including N = 185 university students studying in Germany, 36.6% of the students (women and men) reported to experience depressive symptoms, 41.83% (women and men) reported high levels of state anxiety, and mental stress due to excessive demands and uncertainty in finances, job, or social relationships [ 21 ]. This prevalence of academic stress and mental health burdens have been found among university students all over the globe [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ], including Egypt [ 22 , 23 ].

Thus, as a population group, university students may be particularly vulnerable to stress-related lifestyle changes affecting mental health that are associated with the current COVID-19 pandemic. Individual differences in mental health may also exist and influence how the students perceive and how well they adapt and cope with the current COVID-19 pandemic situation and to what degree they are motivated to change their behaviour in response to the pandemic consequences in social and academic life and teaching. Psychological theories and models of behaviour change, e.g., Health Belief Model, Transtheoretical Model, or Social Cognitive Theory [ 24 , 25 , 26 ], all agree in that individual factors, specifically those related to emotion- and self-regulation can explain how people perceive themselves, whether and why they change their behaviour and why others do not. Threat perception has been suggested to play an outstanding role [ 27 ], because pandemics threaten the whole person, i.e. our self and the self-concept. Personality traits although considered stable may play a critical role in threat perception, in mental health and behaviour because they influence and modulate the person’s feelings, beliefs, and the person’s trust in one’s own self-regulatory abilities required to change one’s own behaviour [ 27 ]. Moreover, stable personality traits and a positive self-concept are considered general important stress buffers and protectors of mental health, whereas neuroticisms, trait anxiety, difficulties in describing and identifying feelings as well as an overall negative self-concept are considered significant risk factors of mental ill-health, specifically of anxiety disorder and depressive disorder [ 28 , 29 , 30 ].

These examples underscore the complexity and dynamics of how individual traits and state-like individual psychological factors as well as characteristics of the situation interact and influence subjective experience and behaviour. Methodologically, this raises questions of how interactions between situation, person and behaviour can best be assessed, investigated, modeled and predicted in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic in which little empirical evidence is available so far and different aggregated data measures of qualitative and quantitative origin might be used to best capture the internal personal variables of interest (e.g., feelings, worries, self-concept, or personality traits) that provide insight into the subjective experience and the perceived changes in health and behaviour of individual persons behaving in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Computational modeling and machine learning have been already successfully applied in the field of pandemic research to predict transmission rates of the virus based on global behavioural changes of the general population [ 31 ]. These approaches require huge data sets (big data). In health behaviour research, first attempts have been made to apply computational models to data sets comprising smaller sample sizes to model behaviour of individuals, for instance, in response to behavioural interventions supporting health prevention [ 32 ]. These computational models build on psychological theories of human behaviour. Character Computing is one of these psychologically-driven approaches, whose computational models include stable character traits (e.g., personality, self-concept) and cognitive, affective, and motivational state variables and behavioural indicators as input to take into consideration the dynamic interactions between situation (S), person (P) and behaviour (B) (for an overview, see [ 33 , 34 , 35 ] and Fig.  1 ). The computational models are not fixed but can be improved and extended, e.g., by ontologies [ 36 ] or automated data processing, the more empirical evidence and data is available [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ].

Illustration of the dynamic relationships between situation, a person’s character (traits and states), and behaviour change

Aim of this online survey study

Based on the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic outlined above, this online survey study is aimed at contributing to the scientific understanding of the psychological consequences of the pandemic by investigating mental health, subjective experience, and behaviour among university students studying in Egypt or Germany after the first pandemic lockdown in May 2020. As outlined above, university students may be particularly sensitive to lifestyle changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, negatively affecting the students’ mental health, their subjective experience and behaviour. Moreover, as also explained above, the students’ personality traits and self-concept might constitute important stable psychological variables that could influence mental health as well as subjective experience and behaviour related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, to fully capture these psychological aspects, psychological assessment included a number of psychological variables ranging from stable personality traits and self-concept to state-like psychological variables sensitive to situational change and related to (a) mental health (current depressive symptoms and state anxiety), (b) pandemic threat and emotion perception including current feelings, (c) worries about health including perceived changes in paying attention to bodily symptoms, and (d) self-reported perceived changes in health behaviour (weight, eating, sleeping, physical activity), social and learning behaviour (difficulties in self-regulated learning). To capture all aspects summarized under (a)–(d), the assessment methods comprised a mix of self-report tools (survey items, standardized psychometric scales, psychological questionnaires, and linguistic self-report measures).

Data analysis included (a) descriptive analysis for prevalence estimation of mental health variables, (b) linguistic analysis of self-concept, personality and feelings during the pandemic and (c) correlational analysis and machine learning tools. Machine learning tools were used for exploratory purpose only to further explore the idea of whether machine learning algorithms could despite small sample sizes be trained to predict stable personality traits from the self-report data of the students. Knowing whether stable personality traits (that due to their stability cannot easily be changed by health care interventions) can be predicted from the students’ self-report data could help develop individualized health care interventions that take the students’ personality development into account. The online survey was distributed among university students studying at universities in Egypt and also in Germany. Both countries were equally affected by the lockdowns in May 2020. With respect to the already published survey studies (see above), all attesting an increase in mental ill health among university students during the COVID-19 pandemic the following main research questions were addressed:

RQ1 Mental health: Can the present online survey study confirm high state anxiety and depressive symptoms reported in previous studies in the current sample of university students during the time period of the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in May 2020? Crucially, are the self-reported symptoms of anxiety and depression when assessed on standardized psychological screening and assessments tools beyond the cut off scores of clinical samples, and comparable or even higher than the prevalence rates reported in pre-pandemic surveys?

RQ2 Threat perception and worries about health: Do university students report to experience threat, negative feelings and worries about health during the COVID-19 pandemic?

RQ3 Emotion perception: Do university students report to perceive difficulties in emotion perception in the time period of the first pandemic lockdown relative to before the pandemic?

RQ4 Health behaviour, social behaviour and learning: Do university students report to perceive changes in health behaviour (e.g., weight, eating, sleeping, physical activity, paying attention to bodily symptoms), and do they report to experience difficulties in self-regulation during learning (teaching), and in social behaviour in the time period of the first pandemic lockdown?

RQ5 Self-concept and personality: Do university students report a positive or a negative self-concept? Are mental health variables correlated with the students’ personality?

RQ6 Exploratory analysis: Can machine learning despite small data sample sizes predict stable personality traits from the self-report data of the students?

Participants

The survey study was designed and conducted by the Department of Applied Emotion and Motivation Psychology of Ulm University and administered via Ulm University and LimeSurvey software ( https://www.limesurvey.org/de/ ). The survey was advertised among others via the university’s international office to reach specifically students studying in Egypt. The survey was provided in English language (i.e., the academic language), and proficiency in English language was a prerequisite for taking part in the study. Participants were fully debriefed about the purpose of the survey, participation was voluntary and anonymous (see ethics statement). After registration, participants answered questions about their language proficiency, age, gender, their university, study year, and their living situation (alone, with friends or family). Only university students who were aged 18 years and older, and who provided informed consent were able to participate in the study. The survey items were structured in blocks of items and questionnaires: sociodemographic (1), personality (Big-Five) and anxiety (state and trait) (2), survey items about teaching, survey items about health including the linguistic task (self-concept) (3–4), and finally, emotion perception and depression screening (5). The blocking of the serial order of these topics lead to partial drop-outs across the survey, particularly across blocks (see below).

An overview of the complete study-design is provided in the flow-diagram in Fig.  2 . An overview of the online survey items and questionnaires can be found in the Additional file 1 .

Design of the survey including data collection and recruitment of participants and data analytics. Please see sections ““ Aim of this online survey study ” and “ Methods ” for detailed explanation

Study sample, survey drop-out and missing data

In total, N = 453 university students registered for the study and answered the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Of these, n = 3 were pilots and n = 11 participants did not give informed consent or did not explicitly state that they want to get their data published in scientific research, and were therefore excluded from the study sample. N = 439 volunteers (n = 215 men, n = 219 women, n = 5 did prefer not to name their gender; mean age : 20.69 years, SD  = 2.87 years) completed the sociodemographic questions. Of these, n = 19 (4.3%) did not report to study in Germany or Egypt and were excluded. Of the 420 university students who reported to study in Egypt or Germany, n = 325 participants (n = 167 men, n = 156 women, n = 2 did prefer not to name their gender; mean age : 20.38 years, SD  = 1.76 years, range: 18–33 years) filled in the personality and anxiety questionnaires only, while n = 220 participants (n = 112 men, n = 107 women, n = 1 did prefer not to name the gender; mean age : 20.45 years, SD  = 1.88 years, range: 18–33 years) completed the entire survey. This corresponds to a survey completion rate of 0.49 (division of the number of participants who complete the entire survey (n = 220) by the total number of participants who register for the survey (n = 453)). This rate falls within the rate expected for online surveys (20–50%).

Analysis of the drop-outs (including e.g., univariate measures of variance (ANOVA)), showed no difference in age between the groups (i.e., the sample who filled in the sociodemographic items only (n = 95) versus the sample who filled in the personality and anxiety questionnaires only (n = 105) versus the final sample (n = 220), F (417,2) = 1.72, p  = .18. In addition, the student samples did not differ with respect to gender, i.e., the % of the number of women and men. Analysis of anxiety and personality scores likewise suggests that the final sample and the sample who dropped-out after filling in the personality or anxiety questionnaires (n = 220 versus n = 105) did not differ in state anxiety or in the scores on any of the Big-Five personality dimension. (state anxiety: F (323,1) = 1.77, p  > .18; Openness: F (323,1) = 0.16, p  > .69; Conscientiousness: F (323,1) = 2.82, p  > .13; Extraversion: F (332,1) = 0.94, p  > .33; Agreeableness: F (323,1) = .062, p  > .43; Neuroticism: F (323,1) = 1.22, p  > .27). Mean scores of trait anxiety differed between the final sample and the sample who dropped out (n = 220: mean : 46.02, SD  = 11.2, range : 26–79 vs. n = 105: mean : 49.02, SD  = 10.98, range : 26–77, F (323,1) = 5.78, p  = .017). However, using median tests (which are less susceptible to outliers) showed no significant difference in the distribution of trait anxiety scores between the samples (median-test = 1.59, p  = .21), see Fig.  3 for an overview.

State and Trait Anxiety distributions across the final sample and drop outs (left upper column). Mean state and trait anxiety scores in women and man in the final sample (left lower column), significant results ( p  < .05) are illustrated by lines and cross. Percentage of students reporting depressive symptoms (middle column). Right column: Percentage of students reporting changes in emotion perception on the TAS-20 questionnaire and subscales after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak

The survey was programmed such that it produced as little missing data as possible. Therefore, missing data of single items in a questionnaire or in a block of open items could be excluded and missing scores were therefore not imputed. Regarding the self-generated prompts, participants were free to answer the prompts (self-concept and feeling descriptions). Inspection of the data shows that in the full sample, 5 participants did not fill in all of self-descriptive prompts, leaving open 1, 2 or 3 of the descriptions, respectively.

Measures: survey items and questionnaires

The online survey included several self-report measures comprising a mix of single items with open and closed questions, standardized psychometric scales, and standardized psychological questionnaires. The section below and Table  1 provide an overview of the survey items, questionnaire measures and hypotheses grouped according to the psychological domains and research questions of interest (for an overview, see also RQ1–RQ6 in the section “ Aim of this online survey study ”).

Mental health: anxiety (trait/state), current depressive symptoms (last 2 weeks)

As illustrated in Table  1 , the participants anxiety proneness including trait and state anxiety as well as their current self-reported depressive symptoms (last 2 weeks) were assessed with psychological questionnaires including the Spielberger Trait and State Inventory (STAI, [ 37 ]), and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-2, [ 38 ]). The STAI is available in many different languages and has shown similar values of internal consistencies among university students from European and Arabic countries [ 39 ]. Whereas the trait scale of the STAI asks for how one generally feels, the instruction of the state scale of the STAI asks for how one feels right now. The PHQ-2 has proven to be a robust screening for depressive symptoms across different cultures including European and Arabic countries [ 40 ]. It asks for the presence of depressive symptoms over a time period of the last two weeks.

Threat perception, feelings, and perceived difficulties in emotion perception during the COVID-19 pandemic

Threat perception as well as discrete emotions and feelings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic situation were assessed by single survey items. Specifically, these items asked the participants about how the current COVID-19 pandemic situation makes them feel in terms of valence (positive/pleasant-negative/unpleasant), arousal (low/calm-high/aroused), and dominance (feeling in or out of control of the situation). The 9-point Self-Assessment Manikin scales (SAM, [ 41 ]) were used for valence, arousal and dominance assessment. The SAM scales are one of the most robust and frequently used scales for the unbiased, non-verbal assessment of emotions and feelings on the three dimensions of emotions including valence, arousal and dominance [ 41 ]. In accordance with the literature [ 41 ], the SAM scales ranged from 1 (negative/unpleasant, low arousal/calm, out of control) to 9 (positive/pleasant, high arousal/aroused, in control). In addition, we asked the participants to indicate which kind of discrete emotions they experienced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants could choose among six discrete emotions (sad, anxious, angry, disgusted, happy, surprised, or neutral). In addition, participants were given five prompts to describe their current feelings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic situation (“I feel ….”). In order to assess potential difficulties in emotion perception, participants filled in the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20; [ 42 ]), which comprises the three subscales “Difficulty Describing Feelings”, “Difficulty Identifying Feelings”, and “Externally-Oriented Thinking”. Since we were interested in perceived changes since the pandemic outbreak, participants were instructed to answer each item of the TAS-20 questionnaire relative to before the pandemic.

Worries about health and perceived changes in behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic

Worries about health, perceived changes in paying attention to bodily symptoms (e.g., taste, smell, cardiovascular, respiration/breathing, appetite/eating/drinking), as well as perceived changes in health behaviour (weight, eating behaviour, sleep and physical activity behaviour) as well as perceived difficulties in social behaviour (social distancing) and self-regulatory learning (i.e., difficulties in paying attention to the content provided by e-learning, difficulties in studying with the same effort as before the pandemic situation) were assessed via single survey items. The single item questions that asked for worries and perceived changes in behaviour could be answered with “yes” or “no”; “yes” meaning an increase and “no” meaning no change in relation to before the pandemic. The items on health behaviour included items asking in both directions, e.g., whether one eats more or less, sleeps more or less, exercises more or less than before the pandemic. The single item questions of paying attention to bodily symptoms could be answered on 10-point Likert scales such that change scores could be calculated based on the participants’ answers allowing evaluation of the degree of change as increase, decrease or no change during the pandemic situation in relation to before the pandemic (see Table  1 for an overview).

Personality and self-concept

As illustrated in Table  1 , the participants’ personality traits were assessed with the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI-40, [ 43 ]). The BFI-40 is a standardized self-report measure that has been validated in different cultural populations and age groups [ 44 ]. The self-concept was assessed using a modified short version of the twenty statements tests (TST, [ 45 ]). The TST is a cross-cultural tool for the assessment of different facets of the self-concept including actual, ideal, and ought selves. In the present study, participants had to generate self-descriptions for the actual self only. In line with the instruction of the TST [ 45 ], participants were asked to provide five words to the prompts “I am ….” in order to describe themselves.

Mental health: anxiety (trait and state) and current depressive symptoms

In line with previous pre-pandemic surveys among university students (see Background for an overview), we expected a high prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the present sample of university students irrespective of their culture or country in which they study. Prevalence rates for self-reported current depressive symptoms assessed with the screening tool of the PHQ-2 asking for depressive symptoms in the last 2 weeks (PHQ-2 items: item1: “little interest or pleasure in doing things”; item 2: “feeling down, depressed or hopeless”) and state anxiety (asking for how one feels right now) might be expected to be even higher than prevalence rates reported in previous surveys before the pandemic situation.

Threat perception, feelings, and difficulties in emotion perception

We expected threat perception to the COVID-19 pandemic to be associated with self-reported unpleasantness, feelings of moderate to high levels of arousal, self-reported perceived lack of dominance (feeling less in control of the situation) on the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scales. In addition, we expected self-reports of feelings of anger, sadness, and anxiety towards the pandemic as assessed by the survey items assessing discrete emotions. We also explored whether students report to perceive changes in emotion perception since the pandemic outbreak relative to before the pandemic outbreak. Specifically, we explored whether participants report difficulties in describing and identifying feelings and report externally oriented thinking on the TAS-20 as potential maladaptive adaptions in coping with the pandemic lockdown. As mentioned above, the instruction of the TAS-20 items asked the participants to answer the items in relation to before the pandemic.

Worries about health, perceived changes in behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic

We expected that the majority of students will report to be more worried about their mental and physical health than before the pandemic. Moreover, we expected a higher awareness of bodily symptoms (i.e., paying more attention to perceived changes in smell, taste, cardiovascular functions, breathing/respiration, and appetite/eating/drinking) relative to before the pandemic. Given that the lockdown in every country had effects on the students’ work and leisure time activities, we also expected that participants will report changes in health behaviour including a decrease in regular physical activity compared to before the pandemic lockdown including self-reported changes in eating- and sleeping behaviour and weight. We also expected difficulties in learning and social behaviour (see Table  1 ).

Moreover, we examined how university students see themselves (self-concept). In particular, we explored whether the students would report a positive or negative self-concept and compared their linguistic descriptions of the self to their descriptions of their current feelings pandemic-related feelings (“I feel …) and their personality. Regarding personality, we explored whether stable psychological personality traits (Big Five and trait anxiety) would be correlated with state anxiety and depressive symptoms and the students’ perceived changes in emotion perception. Finally, we examined for exploratory purpose, whether machine learning could predict the students’ personality traits from their reports (for details see “Data Analysis” section).

Descriptive analyses and statistics

To answer the hypotheses outlined above, the participants’ answers (questionnaires, single items) were analysed descriptively to provide insight into how many students on average reported anxiety and depressive symptoms as well as how many students reported to perceive changes in subjective experience (threat perception, difficulties in emotion perception, worries about health, bodily symptoms) and behaviour (health, social, learning). Analysis of the questionnaires (PHQ-2, STAI, TAS-20, BFI-40) followed the guidelines and manuals and were calculated as sum scores or mean scores (non-normalized). For the PHQ-2, STAI and TAS-20, cut off scores are available from the literature (see “ Results ” section). These cut off scores were also used in the present study to discriminate between high versus low trait anxiety, high versus low state anxiety, depressive symptoms, and difficulties in emotion perception. Means and standard deviations were calculated for all questionnaire data and for the closed survey items using Likert scales or the SAM scales. The questionnaire data and answers to the survey items were tested statistically for significance by means of non-parametric or parametric statistical tests as appropriate. The respective test statistics are presented in brackets in the “ Results ” sections. Given the drop-out across blocks of the survey (see section about Sample size, survey drop-out and missing data), the results for each scale, item or questionnaire were calculated for the available sample who filled in the questions and the final sample (n = 220) who filled in the complete survey and who reported to study in Egypt or Germany. P values are reported uncorrected and two tailed if not otherwise specified. The SPSS software (IBM SPSS Statistics Software, Version 27) was used for all statistical testing including correlation analysis (see below).

Correlational analysis

Correlation analyses (Pearson) were used to assess the relationships between the Big Five personality traits (BFI-40), mental health variables (STAI: trait and state anxiety, PHQ2: screening for depressive symptoms), and difficulties in emotion perception (TAS-20). P values are reported uncorrected and two tailed if not otherwise specified.

Linguistic analysis of self-concept and feelings

The open-ended linguistic answers assessing the self-concept (“I am …”) and feelings in response to the pandemic (“I feel …”) were analysed with computer-assisted text analysis tools including Linguistic Inquiry of Word Count (LIWC; [ 46 ]). The dictionary of the LIWC software contains words and word stems, grouped into semantic categories related to psychological constructs. The categories provided by the LIWC allow the assessment of the polarity of words (positive or negative). The LIWC analysis produces reliably results with about 500 words and more. Therefore, in the present study, words generated by each participant were accumulated across participants and entered as a whole text corpus for words generated for the prompts “I am …” (self-concept) or for the prompt “I feel …” (feelings in response to the pandemic), respectively. This allows the evaluation of the self-concept and current pandemic feelings of the university sample as a whole. For the linguistic analysis no statistic testing was performed.

Machine learning (exploratory analysis)

Machine learning (ML) was used for exploratory purpose only and the ML algorithms were chosen to combine the different psychological variables that were descriptively analysed in order to explore whether individual personality traits including the Big Five and trait anxiety can be predicted and classified by automated machine learning tools. To this end, the questionnaire scores and answers to the different survey items were preprocessed according to the following procedure: the participants’ Big Five personality traits from the BFI-40, the state and trait anxiety scores (from the STAI including for each individual, a difference score for self-reported trait and state anxiety), depression (PHQ-2), perceived changes regarding difficulties in emotion perception (TAS-20) as well as the participants’ answers on the SAM scales for threat perception (e.g., valence, arousal, dominance) were normalized (z-scores). The participants’ answers to the discrete emotions elicited during the pandemic, difference scores assessing increase in current anxiety (difference score comparing STAI state vs. STAI trait) as well as the participants’ answers to the survey items asking for worries and perceived changes in health and behaviour were labeled as positive or negative or set to zero if the students reported no change. The answers to the survey items asking for perceived changes in paying attention to bodily sensations/symptoms were combined to a total score denoting the total perceived changes in attention towards bodily sensations/symptoms and the total change was labeled as positive or negative depending on whether attention increased or decreased relative to before the pandemic or set to zero if there was no change. Sociodemographic variables such as country or university were no contribution factors in prediction and classification. After data preprocessing and data labeling, the dataset for machine learning comprised continuous features and discrete categorical features. The whole dataset was denoted “X” and the continuous or discrete features were denoted “y” in the feature matrix. The machine learning libraries of the Python software package ( https://www.python.org/ ) were used for automated data analysis. Data analysis was based on regression models. Gradient Boosting Regression (GBR) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) were chosen for the regression models. The principle of Gradient Boosting Regression is to build multiple regression models based on decision trees. Decision tree models are supervised machine learning algorithms that have tree structures that recursively break down the dataset into smaller datasets through branching operations while comparing the final node results with the target values. Decision tree models provide the best fit for small sample sizes to avoid overfitting the data. The same holds true for support vector machine algorithms. Support Vector Regressions (SVR) aim at finding the best fitting line in continuous data within a predefined threshold error. The evaluation of the accuracy of the prediction is evaluated based on the root mean squared error (RMSE). Depending on the type of data to be predicted, RMSE within 10–20% of the range is considered a good result. Especially with human self-report, data accuracies are usually much lower than in other more deterministic domains of machine learning e.g., natural language processing or bioinformatics. One reason for the lower accuracies in human behaviour data is the higher variance in the data itself [ 47 ]. To account for this, we accepted a RMSE of up to 16.6% as sufficient for the decision that the data can be predicted by the model accurately.

We used the classical train/test split approach with a ratio of 8:2. Train/test split is a common validation approach frequently used in ML studies including those with smaller sample sizes [for a critical review see [ 48 ]). No k-fold cross validation (CV) approach was chosen as it has been shown that k-fold CV can lead to overestimation especially with small sample sizes, whereas train/test split and nested CV approaches have been shown to be equally reliable even with small sample sizes [ 48 ]. We also performed hyperparameter tuning, an algorithm frequently used and recommended in machine learning to choose and select during training the best model while avoiding biasing the data, and the number of features and the feature-to-sample ratio) was kept in an optimal range (less features than samples) for avoiding overfitting [ 48 ].

Descriptive data analytics

Mental health: anxiety (trait and state) and depressive symptoms.

The mean state and trait anxiety scores of the university students who completed the entire survey and who studied in Egypt or in Germany (n = 220) were above the cut off scores that according to the literature distinguishes between high versus low anxious subjects [ 49 ]. The mean state anxiety score as measured with the STAI inventory was significantly above the cut of score of 40 (n = 220, mean : 50.04, SD  = 3.77; T  = 39.47, df  = 219, cut off: 40, p  < 0.001). A cut off score below or above a score of 44 in the trait STAI scale differentiates between low trait anxious and high anxiety prone individuals [ 49 ]. The mean score for trait anxiety was significantly higher than this cut off score (n = 220, mean: 46.02, SD  = 11.56; T  = 2.60, df  = 219, cut off: 44, p  < 0.01). Given the drop-out of n = 105 students, the analysis of the mean state and trait anxiety scores were recalculated for the final sample including those students who dropped out. The analysis showed that also in this larger sample of n = 325 students the cut off scores were significantly above the cut off scores (state anxiety: n = 325; mean : 50.23, SD  = 3.75; T  = 49.13, df  = 324, cut off: 40, p  < 0.001; trait anxiety: n = 325; mean : 47.08, SD  = 11.52; T  = 4.72, df  = 324, cut off: 44, p  < 0.001) and in addition, trait anxiety scores (trait) did not differ significantly between women and men in this sample (trait anxiety: n = 325; mean-woman : 47.94, SD  = 11.82; men: 45.96, SD  = 10.91; F (321,1) = 2.45, p  > 0.12). However, women reported higher state anxiety scores than men. This difference in state anxiety scores between women and men was significant (state anxiety: n = 325; mean-woman : 50.81, SD  = 3.62; men: 49.63, SD  = 3.79; F (321,1) = 8.08, p  < 0.005) and was also significant in the n = 220 sample. There was no significant difference in state anxiety scores between students studying in Egypt or Germany, neither in the n = 220 sample nor in the sample comprising n = 325 students (n = 220, state anxiety: Egypt- mean : 50.16, SD  = 3.75, Germany- mean : 49.08, SD  = 3.86, Mann – Whitney-U  = -1.39, p  = 0.16; n = 325, state anxiety: Egypt- mean  = 50.32, SD  = 3.70, Germany- mean : 49.45, SD  = 4.22, Mann – Whitney-U  = -1.24, p  = 0.22). However, students studying in Egypt reported higher trait anxiety compared to the students studying in Germany (n = 325, trait anxiety: Egypt- mean : 47.62, SD  = 11.60, Germany- mean : 42.24, SD  = 9.75, n = 220, trait anxiety: Egypt- mean : 46.49, SD  = 11.57, Germany- mean : 42.40, SD  = 10.93), but this difference was not significant in the final sample (n = 220, Mann – Whitney-U  = − 1.39, p  = 0.16). The results are illustrated and summarized in Fig.  3 .

For the PHQ-2 screening for depressive symptoms a sum score greater than 3 on both items is associated with depression proneness [ 38 ]. In the sample of university students who completed the entire survey and therefore had filled in the PHQ-2 depression screening, the mean sum score was mean: 3.48, SD  = 1.58, and significantly above the cut off score ( T  = 4.51, df  = 219, cut off = 3, p  < 0.0001). 51.82% (n = 114) of the students had sum scores greater than the cut off (> 3), and 19.09% (n = 42) had a sum score of 3 (cut off). Only 26.82% (n = 59) of the sample scored below the PHQ-2 cut off score (< 3), and only 2.27% (n = 5) did report to not suffer from loss of interest or pleasure in doing things (PHQ-2 item 1) or from feeling down, depressed or hopeless during the last two weeks (PHQ-2 item 1) (see Fig.  3 for an overview on state anxiety and depressive symptoms). The PHQ-2 scores did not differ between students studying in Egypt or Germany (n = 220, Egypt- mean : 3.51, SD  = 1.56, Germany- mean : 3.24, SD  = 1.79, Mann – Whitney-U  = − 0.643, p  = 0.52) nor did they differ between women and men (n = 220, woman- mean : 3.48, SD  = 1.54, men- mean : 3.47, SD  = 1.63, F (217,1) = 0.00, p  = 0.98).

Descriptive analysis of the items assessing threat perception (SAM; Self-Assessment Manikin scales ranging from 1 (unpleasant, not aroused, or no control) to 9 (pleasant, very highly aroused, in control)) showed that, the students (n = 220) felt slightly unpleasant ( mean : 4.19, SD  = 1.97). In addition, 55% (n = 120) of the final study sample (n = 220) reported a score from 1 to 4, i.e., from high unpleasantness to moderate unpleasantness on the 9-point SAM valence scale. On average, the students did not feel much in or out of control of the situation ( mean : 5.07, SD  = 2.41) on the 9-point SAM scale for dominance. Nevertheless, 37.55% of the study sample reported a score from 1 (no control) to 4 (loss of control) on the SAM scale for dominance. Mean physiological arousal was rated as moderate ( mean : 5.40, SD  = 2.22). However, 50% of the university students (n = 110) reported an arousal score of 6 (aroused) to 9 (very high arousal) on the SAM arousal scale. Given the drop-out of students, comparisons of the ratings (valence, arousal, or control) were performed between samples (n = 220 and n = 59 who completed the ratings but did not fill in the entire survey). This showed that the ratings did not differ between the samples ( Mann – Whitney-U -tests, all p  > 0.70). From the set of discrete emotions (including sadness, anger, fear, disgust, happiness, surprise, or neutral emotions), 66.8% reported to feel not neutral, 93.2% reported to feel not happy, 56.4% reported to feel sad, 75.9% reported to feel angry, 92.3% reported to feel surprised, 87.7% reported to feel disgusted, and 52.7% reported to feel afraid by the current pandemic situation. The distribution of “yes” versus “no” answers differed significantly for the categories feel neutral, happy, surprised, disgusted, or angry, respectively, (non-parametric test for binomial distribution: all p  < 0.001). From all students who completed these items (n = 277) the same significant results were obtained for the answers concerning discrete emotions.

16.88% of the students of the final sample (n = 220) had a total TAS-20 score greater than the critical TAS-20 cut off score (TAS-20 cut off > 60, [ 30 ]). From the three subscales of the TAS-20 questionnaire, changes in self-reported difficulties in emotion perception in relation to the pandemic as compared to before the pandemic were reported by 62.27% (n = 137) for items belonging to the subscale “Difficulty describing feelings”, and by 71.82% (n = 158) for the items belonging to the subscale “Difficulty identifying feelings” and by 50.91% (n = 112) for the items belonging to the subscale “Externally Orienting Thinking”. The distributions of the TAS-20 scores of the three subscales did not differ between students studying in Egypt or Germany ( Mann – Whitney-U , all p  > 0.50). However, woman (n = 107) reported higher scores on the subscales “Difficulties identifying feeling” compared to men (n = 112), F (217,1) = 217.1, p  = 0.035.

Worries about health

In the final sample who completed the survey (n = 220), 65.5% (n = 144 students) of the study sample reported to worry about their mental health more due to the COVID-19 pandemic than before the pandemic, whereas 34.5% (n = 76) answered to worry not more than before the pandemic. 71.4% (n = 157) of the students reported to worry more about their physical health than before the pandemic, whereas 28.6% (n = 63) answered to worry not more about their physical health than before the pandemic. The distributions of “yes” versus “no” differed significantly for both, worries about mental and physical health, respectively (non-parametric test for binomial distribution: all p  < 0.001) and this also held true when considering all students who filled in these items (n = 227). Self-reported worries about mental health and physical health were significantly related (χ2 = 100.43, df  = 2, p < 0.001). 65% (n = 143 of n = 220) reported to worry in both domains (mental health and physical health) more than before the pandemic and this also held true when considering all students who filled in these items (n = 227), see Fig.  4 a.

a Worries about mental health or physical health or both (mental and physical health). The cross represents significant results, p  < .05. b Perceived changes in health behaviour including weight, eating, sleeping, and physical activity. The cross represents significant results, p  < .05

Behaviour: health

Across health behaviour domains (weight, eating, sleep, physical activity), 52.3%, 58.2%, 31.8%, and 76.4% of the study sample (n = 220) reported to have gained weight, to eat more than before the pandemic and to not sleep more or exercise more than before the pandemic situation. The distributions of “yes” versus “no” answers were significantly different for the domains of eating, sleep and exercise/physical activity (non-parametric test for binomial distribution: eat, sleep, exercise/physical activity all p  < 0.001) and this again held true when considering all students who filled in the items (n = 227). Paying attention to bodily sensations and symptoms (i.e., changes in taste, smell, appetite/eating/drinking, cardiovascular functions, breathing/respiration) did however not change significantly relative to before the pandemic outbreak. On average, on Likert scales ranging from 1 (“decrease”) to 5 (“no change”) to 10 (“increase”), participants reported not to pay more attention to or to be more aware of bodily sensations and symptoms than before the pandemic (smell: mean : 5.18, SD  = 1.21, taste: mean : 5.15, SD  = 1.27, bodily symptoms: mean : 5.84, SD  = 1.74, cardiac symptoms: mean : 5.78, SD  = 1.66, breathing: mean : 5.77, SD  = 1.64, eating and drinking/appetite: mean : 5.52, SD  = 2.09). The answers on these rating scales did not differ between students studying in Egypt or Germany (all p  > 0.16), but comparisons between women and men showed that women scored significantly higher on the scale asking for attention to bodily symptoms than men (woman- mean : 6.18, SD  = 1.90, men- mean : 5.50, SD  = 1.53, F (217,1) = 8.50, p  > 0.002). This again held true when considering all students who filled in the items (n = 227).

Behaviour: social distancing and learning

Being asked about their social situation of self-isolation, teaching and learning behaviour, 54% of the student sample (n = 220) replied to have difficulties in not going out during the pandemic. 76.4% replied to have difficulties in self-regulated learning, being unable of focusing their attention on the teaching content. Of these students, 60.9% replied to have difficulties in studying with the same self-regulatory effort because of being anxiously preoccupied with the current pandemic situation (see Fig.  4 b). The distributions of “yes” versus “no” answers were significantly different for the domains of learning (non-parametric test for binomial distribution: eat, sleep, exercise/physical activity all p  < 0.002) and this again held true when considering all students who filled in these items (n = 305, all p  < 0.001).

Linguistic self-concept and self-descriptions of current feelings

Linguistic self-descriptions (“I am …”) showed a positivity bias. Overall, more positive words than negative words were used by the students to describe themselves (see Fig.  5 ). As mentioned above, linguistic analysis of the university students’ self-descriptions about how the current COVID-19 pandemic situation makes them feel (“I feel …”) showed the reverse pattern with more negative words than positive words being used by the study sample to complete the prompt “I feel ….” (see Fig.  5 ). In addition, Fig.  6 shows the most prominent examples, i.e., the words most often used by the students to describe their feelings during the pandemic.in the prompt “I feel …”.

Percentage of negative and positive words. Left column: Self-concept: “I am …”. Right column: Current feelings during the pandemic “I feel …”

Summary of the words most often used by the university students to describe their feelings in response to the pandemic

Personality: Big Five

The final student sample (n = 220) scored low on the BFI-40 subscales for extraversion ( mean : 24.5, SD  = 5.65), neuroticism ( mean : 25.37, SD  = 6.51), and reported moderate scores on the conscientiousness scale ( mean : 30.69, SD  = 6.07), the openness scale ( mean : 36.85, SD  = 5.07), and the agreeableness scale ( mean : 33.42, SD  = 4.50) and as described earlier (see section “ Study sample, survey drop-out and missing data ”), the BFI-40 scores of the samples (n = 220 vs. n = 105 who dropped-out) did not differ in the five personality dimensions. The Big Five personality traits were significantly correlated with self-reported depressive and anxiety symptoms as well as with the self-reported difficulties in emotion perception. Table  2 shows a summary of the correlations between measures of personality traits (BFI-40), trait anxiety (STAI-trait scale), state anxiety (STAI-state scale), self-reported depressive symptoms (PHQ-2), and perceived difficulties in emotion perception (TAS-20) as obtained from the final sample (n = 220).

Automated data analytics, machine learning (exploratory)

The university students’ personality traits (Big Five) and trait anxiety could be predicted from the psychological variables (trait and state) summarized in Table  3 through feature importance extraction by Support Vector Regression. The table and the numbers in percent show the major contributing factors to the prediction of the respective trait listed in the left column (under “Measure”). Table  4 shows the prediction accuracy suggesting that prediction of all trait attributes have similar error rates.

The COVID-19 pandemic is taking its toll. Concerns have been raised by the WHO (2020) [ 8 ], that the COVID-19 pandemic will cause “a considerable degree of fear, worry and concern in the population” (cited from WHO, 2020 [ 8 ]) and that stress and anxiety as well as depression will increase considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic, rendering affective disorders a public mental health concern of the COVID-19 pandemic [ 8 ]. In the present survey, mental health (depressive symptoms, state and trait anxiety), subjective experience (threat perception, current feelings, perceived difficulties in emotion perception, worries about health during the pandemic) as well as perceived changes in behaviour (related to health, social behaviour and learning/teaching) was assessed among university students studying in Egypt or Germany, respectively. The survey was administered in May 2020, shortly after the lockdown in these countries. Going beyond previous surveys, the students’ self-concept and the Big Five of human personality were additionally assessed to explore psychological patterns between personality traits, mental health, and perceived changes in subjective experience by means of correlation analysis and machine learning.

Mental health among university students

Regarding pandemic risk groups, previous cross-cultural pre-pandemic surveys have shown high prevalence rates of anxiety and depression among university students across countries [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ]. Therefore, the WHO’s concerns about the psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and well-being might affect university students as a population group as well. The results obtained from this sample of university students who study in Egypt or Germany during the first lockdown period confirm these concerns. In particular, the results confirm previous pre-pandemic results about mental health of university students and they seem to confirm the concerns of the WHO regarding mental health and threat perception during the current pandemic. The mean state anxiety score (assessed with standardized questionnaires including the Spielberger Trait-State Anxiety Inventory, STAI) was significantly above the cut off score that, according to the literature [ 34 ], discriminate high from low anxious subjects. In addition, state anxiety scores were significantly higher in woman than man. Moreover, 51.82% (n = 114) of the students had sum scores greater than the cut off (> 3), and 19.09% (n = 42) had a sum score of 3 (cut off). Only 26.82% (n = 59) of the sample scored below the PHQ-2 cut off score (< 3), and only 2.27% (n = 5) did report to not suffer from loss of interest or pleasure in doing things (PHQ-2 item 1) or from feeling down, depressed or hopeless during the last two weeks (PHQ-2 item 1), and self-reported depressive symptom did not differ among students studying in Egypt or Germany or in woman or men (see Fig.  3 for an overview on state anxiety and depressive symptoms). Thus, in total, 51.82% and 19.09% of the final student sample (n = 220) reported depressive symptoms at and above the cut off score for depressive symptoms [ 38 ], thus feeling depressed or hopeless and reporting a loss of interest and pleasure in the items of the PHQ-2 questionnaire during most of the days of the last 2 weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prevalence rates from previous surveys among university students reported a prevalence of anxiety symptoms or depressive symptoms above 35% among university students before the pandemic (e.g., for depression or anxiety [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ]). A recent online study [ 21 ], including N = 185 university students studying in Germany found that 36.6% of the university students (women and men) report experiencing depressive symptoms, 41.83% (women and men) reported experiencing high levels of state anxiety, and all students reported experiencing stress due to excessive demands and uncertainty in finances, job, or social relationships. These prevalence rates have actually been found in cohort studies including university students all over the globe, irrespective of culture before the outbreak of the pandemic [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ]. In relation to these pre-pandemic prevalence rates, the prevalence of state anxiety and of depressive symptoms in the current sample seem to have more than doubled during the pandemic time period.

The scores for state anxiety need to be seen in relation to the results obtained for trait anxiety. As mentioned above, trait anxiety scores were even higher in those students who dropped-out, however state anxiety scores did not differ across students who completed the survey and those who did not. Students with high state anxiety during the pandemic may be at special risk of suffering from anxiety proneness in the long run. Therefore, surveys among university students should be continued to further explore the development of anxiety and particularly also of depressive symptoms during the current pandemic as well as the comorbidity of anxiety with depressive symptoms as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Very recent surveys among university students from Greece (Europe) and the United States conducted in a similar time period (during the first lockdowns in these countries) report similar high percentage numbers of anxiety, depression and mental health burdens [ 12 , 13 ]). Given that the STAI asks for feelings of stress, worry, discomfort, experienced on a day to day basis one could expect changes in other psychological domains as well (see below).

Threat perception and perceived difficulties in emotion perception

Being asked about their feelings during the pandemic, 55% of the students reported unpleasantness and 37.55% of the students rated to be in loss of control of the situation, and about 50% reported moderate to high physiological arousal. Moreover, university students reported a mix of discrete emotions in response to the pandemic. In particular, there was a significant loss of happiness, and a change in feelings of surprise, disgust and anger. In line with this, as illustrated in Fig.  5 , linguistic analysis of the participants’ answers to the questions “I feel …” also suggest a negativity bias in the linguistic descriptions of the students’ feelings: In summary, there was more intense use of negative than positive words to describe one’s feelings in response to the pandemic. Thus, feelings of threat and negative emotions were also reflected in the self-generated linguistic answers of the students, supporting a general increase in anxiety during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic among university students. Similarly, and in line with the scores obtained from the depression screening instrument (PHQ-2), linguistic analysis of the questions “I feel …” revealed a high percentage of words such as feeling depressed, down or hopeless (see Fig.  6 ). Thus, anxiety and depression related words were amongst the most frequently used words when participants were asked to describe in their own words, how the current COVID-19 pandemic situation makes them feel. The study sample also reported to have perceived difficulties in emotion perception during the pandemic. Using the three subscales of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the participants were instructed to rate whether they experience difficulties in emotion perception relative to before the pandemic situation. Especially difficulties in identifying and describing feelings were reported. Moreover, the sum scores of the TAS-20 were significantly correlated with the students’ anxiety scores and the intensity of self-reported depressive symptoms (see Table  2 ). Taken together, these results are of particular interest in light of discussions which mental health interventions might help university students to cope with the threat provoked by the pandemic situation. Given that previous research has shown that high scores on the TAS-20 promote psychopathology [ 28 , 29 ], the reports of the students about them perceiving difficulties in identifying one’s feelings in response to the pandemic situation relative to before the pandemic outbreak should be taken seriously and investigated in further studies in larger student cohorts.

Worries about health and health behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic

Moreover, the university students’ worries about health should be taken seriously. Chronic worrying is a sign of chronic distress and constitutes a risk factor of later development of general anxiety disorder [ 54 ]. In the current study, 65.5% of the final student sample (n = 220) reported being worried about their mental health and 71.4% reported to worry about their physical health more often than before the pandemic. The majority of the student sample did, however, not report to pay more attention to bodily sensations or symptoms (taste, smell, cardiovascular, respiration/breathing) than before the pandemic. However, worries about mental and physical health were accompanied by perceived changes in health behaviour. The percentage of “yes” and “no”-answers differed significantly for changes in health behaviour related to eating and physical activity behaviour since the outbreak of the pandemic. We did not ask the students for their eating behaviour or their physical activity level before the pandemic. Thus, the questions asking for perceived changes during relative to before the pandemic might have the potential of a memory bias. Nevertheless, pre-pandemic surveys report that up to 30% of university students do not exercise at a regular basis and do not meet the WHO’s weekly or daily physical activity recommendations (for an overview see [ 55 ]). The present results suggest a reduction in physical activity during the pandemic and physical inactivity and sedentarism are among the major risk factors promoting negative lifestyle-related diseases in the long run [ 55 ].

Learning behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic might have negative effects on student’s teaching and learning behaviour. In the present sample of university students, difficulties in teaching and learning were reported by the majority of students. One interpretation of these results is, that pandemic situations such as the current COVID-19 pandemic are characterized by uncertainty, fear, and threat, i.e., factors that are known to impact self-regulation. Previous research has shown that self-regulation is negatively related with threat perception [ 27 ] because responding to fear, anxiety and to threatening events depletes top-down control and self-regulatory resources [ 56 , 57 ] that are also required for academic performance. In line with this, students reported having difficulties in focusing and concentrating on the teaching content during the current COVID-19 pandemic situation (see Fig.  4 b). Self-learning formats such as e-learning may accentuate these effects.

Self-concept and personality of university students, and machine learning

When asked to describe themselves with a modified version of the TST asking for descriptions of the students’ “actual self”, positive word use outweighed negative word use. When the student sample was considered as a whole, linguistic analysis of word use (see Fig.  5 ) supported a clear bias towards positivity that also accords with previous results that seeing yourself in a positive light correlates with positive self-descriptions and preferential processing of positive words [ 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 ]. Although this result must be seen in relation to a general positivity bias in written and spoken language (most languages having more positive than negative words [ 62 ], the analysis of word use suggests that the pandemic situation at the time of the survey did not provoke a threat to the self-concept of this university student sample and this, although linguistic analysis of the answers to the prompt that asked for feelings during the pandemic (see also Fig.  5 ) revealed a negativity bias as immediate negative responses to the pandemic situation in line with the results observed for the survey items asking for threat perception. Symptoms of state anxiety and current depressive symptoms may therefore reflect temporary changes of the university students to the pandemic situation that however occur immediately in response to the pandemic lockdown.

Psychological theories agree that individual factors such as one’s personality are correlated with subjective experience, well-being, mental health, and behaviour, e.g., [ 63 , 64 ]. In line with this, analyses showed correlations between the Big Five (BFI-40) personality traits and the university students’ self-reported symptoms of anxiety, depression and their perceived difficulties in emotion perception. Statistically, correlation analysis, linear regression analysis, multivariate structural equation models, mediator analysis, or moderator analysis may all be feasible statistical methods to describe the relationship between psychological variables. However, in the present study we attempted to apply supervised machine learning algorithms that are built on regression models to further explore whether personality traits were not only correlated with mental health variables but could be predicted from the self-reported subjective experience of the participants obtained from this survey’s multimethod assessment. The observed results are promising despite the relatively small datasets used for training and prediction. The algorithms provided relatively accurate models for the prediction of personality traits from self-report data. As illustrated in Table  3 , neuroticism as one of the big five personality traits (shown to be related to mental ill health [ 63 , 64 ]) and in the present study sample significantly correlated with both, self-reported anxiety and depressive symptoms (see Table  2 ) could best be predicted by changes in current anxiety (threat perception, difference scores state vs trait anxiety), by the students’ self-reported trait and state anxiety, by their self-reported perceived difficulties in emotion perception (describing one’s feelings reported on the TAS-20), by self-reported changes in physical health behaviour (eating) and by self-reported difficulties in social distancing. Very recent results from surveys investigating the role of personality factors during the current COVID-19 pandemic also found that people’s self-reported psychological perceptions of and reactions towards the pandemic also depend on stable personality traits including the Big Five (for an overview [ 65 ]). Interestingly, there is also evidence that expression on personality traits such as the Big Five can change in conjunction with mental ill health [ 66 ]. Our results and these recent results suggest that future studies exploring the psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic should include the assessment of personality traits in their anamnestic exploration of mental health and self-reported experience.

Limitations

The present study adds to the evidence reported in the literature about the negative consequences of the current COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and well-being of university students. By using a mix of self-report measures it allows detailed insight into the subjective experiences associated with the pandemic in this population group in the psychological domains of mental health, health behaviour change and learning. However, some limitations already discussed in the sections above should be stressed. First, there was a high drop-out whose percentage was within the upper range of the expected drop-out rates for online surveys (20–50%). Although drop-outs were statistically assessed and compared to the final sample as far as appropriate, suggesting no bias by age or gender or the student’s personality, the drop-out reduced the final sample size reducing the power of the study. Thus, further data is required to demonstrate the generalizability of the present observations and to further explore possible cultural differences. In the present study sample, the reported significant differences between gender and students studying in Egypt or Germany might be tentative due to the small study samples. Power calculations suggest an ideal sample size of about N = 271 (90% confidence) or N = 385 (95% confidence) participants (margin of error of 5%). Although this sample size was reached in the beginning, it was reduced by the successive drop-out across the blocks of survey items. Second, statistics revealed significant results for the quantitative measures, however, the results of the linguistic tasks (self-concept and feeling prompts) could be reported only descriptively. The LIWC software was used for linguistic analysis. This allowed word categorization with high accuracy and validity [ 46 ] providing interesting insight that otherwise might have gone unnoticed and confirmed the results obtained from quantitative measures. Third, due to the small sample size the machine learning approach is exploratory and challenged by limitations. While machine learning tools have already been applied in many domains of psychology (e.g., in the domain of Affective Computing and Health Psychology), their use is still relatively under investigated in studies using psychology data obtained from multimethod approaches as the current one [ 67 ]. Existing studies using machine learning for analyzing personality- and behaviour-related data, mainly target personality prediction from larger datasets (e.g., [ 68 ]). In the present study, we followed guidelines and recommendations from existing machine learning studies discussing possible solutions for application of machine learning tools with small sample sizes (see for an overview [ 69 , 70 , 71 ]), using sample size of about 200 and support vector machines (SVM similar to SVR used in our study) for estimation of depressive symptoms, for personality trait and perceived stress prediction based on sample sizes ranging from 150 to 250 participants [ 69 , 70 , 71 ], as in the present study. In line with these previous studies applying machine learning tools to smaller sample sizes, we applied machine learning to a mix of measures that captured subjective experience in relation to the current COVID-19 pandemic situation in line with the recommendations from psychologically-driven computational approaches that suggest to include trait and state measures for prediction [ 25 , 26 ]. Nevertheless, the present approach is exploratory and application of machine learning to small sample sizes need to be critically discussed, e.g., for a detailed discussion see [ 48 ], as it can lead to overfitting or overestimation. One recommendation to avoid such problems with small sample sizes is to use nested cross validation and control feature-to-sample ratio [ 48 ]. It will be interesting to follow-up the present ML results in future COVID-19 survey studies and use additional data collected during the course of the pandemic for validation and training in order to confirm the results from ML in hopefully larger samples, supporting the combination of machine learning and classical data analytics in the domain of psychology.

This survey investigated the subjective experience of university students studying in Egypt or Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, i.e., in the time period after the first pandemic lockdown in the countries. Perceived changes in all psychological domains including state anxiety, depressive symptoms, threat perception, emotion perception, worries about health and behaviour (health, social distancing, and learning) were reported in the majority of students taking part in the survey. Recent COVID-10 surveys report similar high prevalence rates among university students across the globe [ 3 , 4 , 12 , 13 ]. Although the results of this survey are tentative, the multimethod approach of this survey, using multiple scales, descriptive, correlational, and linguistic analysis, provides a valuable contribution to previously published COVID-19 studies. Moreover, the approach of combining descriptive analysis with machine learning should and could be followed-up in larger samples during the second period of the current pandemic. Crucially, despite the small sample size, the present results of self-reported anxiety and depressive symptoms among university students, that also seem to be supported by recent surveys including university students from other countries [ 3 , 4 , 12 , 13 ] should be taken serious as they suggest that there is an urgent need to develop interventions that help prevent mental health among university students in order to avoid negative consequences in health and learning behaviour in response to the pandemic and provide health care to those students who might be at special risk of mental ill health.

Questionnaire/survey

The questionnaires and self-assessment scales used in this study are standardized questionnaires and standardized scales whose references are cited in the manuscript in brackets. The single survey questions e.g., health and teaching have been developed for the purpose of this survey and are summarized in Table  1 in the manuscript. An overview of the online survey can be found in the supplement of this manuscript.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Due to the informed consent form in which the possibility of raw data being published online was not explicitly stated, the raw data cannot be made accessible in online repositories.

Abbreviations

BFI five inventory [ 43 ]

Decision tree regression

Gradient Boosting Regression

Linguistic inquiry of word count [ 46 ]

Personal Health Questionnaire 2 [ 38 ]

Root mean squared error

Self-Assessment Manikin scales [ 41 ]

Spielberger Trait State Anxiety Inventory [ 37 ]

Support Vector Regression

Toronto Alexithymia Scale [ 42 ]

World Health Organization

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Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This study was funded by the DAAD/BMBF (principal investigators: CH, SA) and by the budgetary resources of the Department of Applied Emotion and Motivation Psychology, and the open access publication fund of Ulm University. The funding bodies played no role in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript.

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CH conceptualized and designed the study and the survey. CH was involved in data recruitment, in data preprocessing and CH performed data analytics for descriptive and correlational data and results (descriptive data analytics, statistical analysis), and CH interpreted the result, CH supervised the machine learning part, created figures and tables and drafted and wrote the manuscript and revised it for scientific content. AB helped in the survey, performed the machine learning part, the machine learning part was also supervised by SA. All authors read and approved the manuscript.

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The present survey follows ethical guidelines: all students took part voluntarily in the survey. They gave written informed consent prior to filling out the survey. The participants were fully debriefed about the purpose of the study. They were informed that they will be questioned about their health, teaching and learning behaviour, and their subjective experience with the current COVID-19 pandemic situation. They were informed that they can withdraw from the study at any time during the survey without giving reasons or without negative consequences on confidentiality. They were debriefed in detail about data privacy. No individual ethics approval was submitted before the start of the survey. The survey contains questionnaires that are part of online studies that had received approval in previous studies of the corresponding author by the local ethics committee of Ulm University.

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Additional file 1.

. An overview of the online survey items and questionnaires.

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Herbert, C., El Bolock, A. & Abdennadher, S. How do you feel during the COVID-19 pandemic? A survey using psychological and linguistic self-report measures, and machine learning to investigate mental health, subjective experience, personality, and behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic among university students. BMC Psychol 9 , 90 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00574-x

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• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1512-4471 Emily Long 1 ,
• Susan Patterson 1 ,
• Karen Maxwell 1 ,
• Carolyn Blake 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7342-4566 Raquel Bosó Pérez 1 ,
• Ruth Lewis 1 ,
• Mark McCann 1 ,
• Julie Riddell 1 ,
• Kathryn Skivington 1 ,
• Rachel Wilson-Lowe 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4409-6601 Kirstin R Mitchell 2
• 1 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• 2 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Institute of Health & Wellbeing , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• Correspondence to Dr Emily Long, MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G3 7HR, UK; emily.long{at}glasgow.ac.uk

This essay examines key aspects of social relationships that were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses explicitly on relational mechanisms of health and brings together theory and emerging evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to make recommendations for future public health policy and recovery. We first provide an overview of the pandemic in the UK context, outlining the nature of the public health response. We then introduce four distinct domains of social relationships: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy, highlighting the mechanisms through which the pandemic and associated public health response drastically altered social interactions in each domain. Throughout the essay, the lens of health inequalities, and perspective of relationships as interconnecting elements in a broader system, is used to explore the varying impact of these disruptions. The essay concludes by providing recommendations for longer term recovery ensuring that the social relational cost of COVID-19 is adequately considered in efforts to rebuild.

• inequalities

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Introduction

Infectious disease pandemics, including SARS and COVID-19, demand intrapersonal behaviour change and present highly complex challenges for public health. 1 A pandemic of an airborne infection, spread easily through social contact, assails human relationships by drastically altering the ways through which humans interact. In this essay, we draw on theories of social relationships to examine specific ways in which relational mechanisms key to health and well-being were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Relational mechanisms refer to the processes between people that lead to change in health outcomes.

At the time of writing, the future surrounding COVID-19 was uncertain. Vaccine programmes were being rolled out in countries that could afford them, but new and more contagious variants of the virus were also being discovered. The recovery journey looked long, with continued disruption to social relationships. The social cost of COVID-19 was only just beginning to emerge, but the mental health impact was already considerable, 2 3 and the inequality of the health burden stark. 4 Knowledge of the epidemiology of COVID-19 accrued rapidly, but evidence of the most effective policy responses remained uncertain.

The initial response to COVID-19 in the UK was reactive and aimed at reducing mortality, with little time to consider the social implications, including for interpersonal and community relationships. The terminology of ‘social distancing’ quickly became entrenched both in public and policy discourse. This equation of physical distance with social distance was regrettable, since only physical proximity causes viral transmission, whereas many forms of social proximity (eg, conversations while walking outdoors) are minimal risk, and are crucial to maintaining relationships supportive of health and well-being.

The aim of this essay is to explore four key relational mechanisms that were impacted by the pandemic and associated restrictions: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy. We use relational theories and emerging research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic response to make three key recommendations: one regarding public health responses; and two regarding social recovery. Our understanding of these mechanisms stems from a ‘systems’ perspective which casts social relationships as interdependent elements within a connected whole. 5

Social networks

Social networks characterise the individuals and social connections that compose a system (such as a workplace, community or society). Social relationships range from spouses and partners, to coworkers, friends and acquaintances. They vary across many dimensions, including, for example, frequency of contact and emotional closeness. Social networks can be understood both in terms of the individuals and relationships that compose the network, as well as the overall network structure (eg, how many of your friends know each other).

Social networks show a tendency towards homophily, or a phenomenon of associating with individuals who are similar to self. 6 This is particularly true for ‘core’ network ties (eg, close friends), while more distant, sometimes called ‘weak’ ties tend to show more diversity. During the height of COVID-19 restrictions, face-to-face interactions were often reduced to core network members, such as partners, family members or, potentially, live-in roommates; some ‘weak’ ties were lost, and interactions became more limited to those closest. Given that peripheral, weaker social ties provide a diversity of resources, opinions and support, 7 COVID-19 likely resulted in networks that were smaller and more homogenous.

Such changes were not inevitable nor necessarily enduring, since social networks are also adaptive and responsive to change, in that a disruption to usual ways of interacting can be replaced by new ways of engaging (eg, Zoom). Yet, important inequalities exist, wherein networks and individual relationships within networks are not equally able to adapt to such changes. For example, individuals with a large number of newly established relationships (eg, university students) may have struggled to transfer these relationships online, resulting in lost contacts and a heightened risk of social isolation. This is consistent with research suggesting that young adults were the most likely to report a worsening of relationships during COVID-19, whereas older adults were the least likely to report a change. 8

Lastly, social connections give rise to emergent properties of social systems, 9 where a community-level phenomenon develops that cannot be attributed to any one member or portion of the network. For example, local area-based networks emerged due to geographic restrictions (eg, stay-at-home orders), resulting in increases in neighbourly support and local volunteering. 10 In fact, research suggests that relationships with neighbours displayed the largest net gain in ratings of relationship quality compared with a range of relationship types (eg, partner, colleague, friend). 8 Much of this was built from spontaneous individual interactions within local communities, which together contributed to the ‘community spirit’ that many experienced. 11 COVID-19 restrictions thus impacted the personal social networks and the structure of the larger networks within the society.

Social support

Social support, referring to the psychological and material resources provided through social interaction, is a critical mechanism through which social relationships benefit health. In fact, social support has been shown to be one of the most important resilience factors in the aftermath of stressful events. 12 In the context of COVID-19, the usual ways in which individuals interact and obtain social support have been severely disrupted.

One such disruption has been to opportunities for spontaneous social interactions. For example, conversations with colleagues in a break room offer an opportunity for socialising beyond one’s core social network, and these peripheral conversations can provide a form of social support. 13 14 A chance conversation may lead to advice helpful to coping with situations or seeking formal help. Thus, the absence of these spontaneous interactions may mean the reduction of indirect support-seeking opportunities. While direct support-seeking behaviour is more effective at eliciting support, it also requires significantly more effort and may be perceived as forceful and burdensome. 15 The shift to homeworking and closure of community venues reduced the number of opportunities for these spontaneous interactions to occur, and has, second, focused them locally. Consequently, individuals whose core networks are located elsewhere, or who live in communities where spontaneous interaction is less likely, have less opportunity to benefit from spontaneous in-person supportive interactions.

However, alongside this disruption, new opportunities to interact and obtain social support have arisen. The surge in community social support during the initial lockdown mirrored that often seen in response to adverse events (eg, natural disasters 16 ). COVID-19 restrictions that confined individuals to their local area also compelled them to focus their in-person efforts locally. Commentators on the initial lockdown in the UK remarked on extraordinary acts of generosity between individuals who belonged to the same community but were unknown to each other. However, research on adverse events also tells us that such community support is not necessarily maintained in the longer term. 16

Meanwhile, online forms of social support are not bound by geography, thus enabling interactions and social support to be received from a wider network of people. Formal online social support spaces (eg, support groups) existed well before COVID-19, but have vastly increased since. While online interactions can increase perceived social support, it is unclear whether remote communication technologies provide an effective substitute from in-person interaction during periods of social distancing. 17 18 It makes intuitive sense that the usefulness of online social support will vary by the type of support offered, degree of social interaction and ‘online communication skills’ of those taking part. Youth workers, for instance, have struggled to keep vulnerable youth engaged in online youth clubs, 19 despite others finding a positive association between amount of digital technology used by individuals during lockdown and perceived social support. 20 Other research has found that more frequent face-to-face contact and phone/video contact both related to lower levels of depression during the time period of March to August 2020, but the negative effect of a lack of contact was greater for those with higher levels of usual sociability. 21 Relatedly, important inequalities in social support exist, such that individuals who occupy more socially disadvantaged positions in society (eg, low socioeconomic status, older people) tend to have less access to social support, 22 potentially exacerbated by COVID-19.

Social and interactional norms

Interactional norms are key relational mechanisms which build trust, belonging and identity within and across groups in a system. Individuals in groups and societies apply meaning by ‘approving, arranging and redefining’ symbols of interaction. 23 A handshake, for instance, is a powerful symbol of trust and equality. Depending on context, not shaking hands may symbolise a failure to extend friendship, or a failure to reach agreement. The norms governing these symbols represent shared values and identity; and mutual understanding of these symbols enables individuals to achieve orderly interactions, establish supportive relationship accountability and connect socially. 24 25

Physical distancing measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 radically altered these norms of interaction, particularly those used to convey trust, affinity, empathy and respect (eg, hugging, physical comforting). 26 As epidemic waves rose and fell, the work to negotiate these norms required intense cognitive effort; previously taken-for-granted interactions were re-examined, factoring in current restriction levels, own and (assumed) others’ vulnerability and tolerance of risk. This created awkwardness, and uncertainty, for example, around how to bring closure to an in-person interaction or convey warmth. The instability in scripted ways of interacting created particular strain for individuals who already struggled to encode and decode interactions with others (eg, those who are deaf or have autism spectrum disorder); difficulties often intensified by mask wearing. 27

Large social gatherings—for example, weddings, school assemblies, sporting events—also present key opportunities for affirming and assimilating interactional norms, building cohesion and shared identity and facilitating cooperation across social groups. 28 Online ‘equivalents’ do not easily support ‘social-bonding’ activities such as singing and dancing, and rarely enable chance/spontaneous one-on-one conversations with peripheral/weaker network ties (see the Social networks section) which can help strengthen bonds across a larger network. The loss of large gatherings to celebrate rites of passage (eg, bar mitzvah, weddings) has additional relational costs since these events are performed by and for communities to reinforce belonging, and to assist in transitioning to new phases of life. 29 The loss of interaction with diverse others via community and large group gatherings also reduces intergroup contact, which may then tend towards more prejudiced outgroup attitudes. While online interaction can go some way to mimicking these interaction norms, there are key differences. A sense of anonymity, and lack of in-person emotional cues, tends to support norms of polarisation and aggression in expressing differences of opinion online. And while online platforms have potential to provide intergroup contact, the tendency of much social media to form homogeneous ‘echo chambers’ can serve to further reduce intergroup contact. 30 31

Intimacy relates to the feeling of emotional connection and closeness with other human beings. Emotional connection, through romantic, friendship or familial relationships, fulfils a basic human need 32 and strongly benefits health, including reduced stress levels, improved mental health, lowered blood pressure and reduced risk of heart disease. 32 33 Intimacy can be fostered through familiarity, feeling understood and feeling accepted by close others. 34

Intimacy via companionship and closeness is fundamental to mental well-being. Positively, the COVID-19 pandemic has offered opportunities for individuals to (re)connect and (re)strengthen close relationships within their household via quality time together, following closure of many usual external social activities. Research suggests that the first full UK lockdown period led to a net gain in the quality of steady relationships at a population level, 35 but amplified existing inequalities in relationship quality. 35 36 For some in single-person households, the absence of a companion became more conspicuous, leading to feelings of loneliness and lower mental well-being. 37 38 Additional pandemic-related relational strain 39 40 resulted, for some, in the initiation or intensification of domestic abuse. 41 42

Physical touch is another key aspect of intimacy, a fundamental human need crucial in maintaining and developing intimacy within close relationships. 34 Restrictions on social interactions severely restricted the number and range of people with whom physical affection was possible. The reduction in opportunity to give and receive affectionate physical touch was not experienced equally. Many of those living alone found themselves completely without physical contact for extended periods. The deprivation of physical touch is evidenced to take a heavy emotional toll. 43 Even in future, once physical expressions of affection can resume, new levels of anxiety over germs may introduce hesitancy into previously fluent blending of physical and verbal intimate social connections. 44

The pandemic also led to shifts in practices and norms around sexual relationship building and maintenance, as individuals adapted and sought alternative ways of enacting sexual intimacy. This too is important, given that intimate sexual activity has known benefits for health. 45 46 Given that social restrictions hinged on reducing household mixing, possibilities for partnered sexual activity were primarily guided by living arrangements. While those in cohabiting relationships could potentially continue as before, those who were single or in non-cohabiting relationships generally had restricted opportunities to maintain their sexual relationships. Pornography consumption and digital partners were reported to increase since lockdown. 47 However, online interactions are qualitatively different from in-person interactions and do not provide the same opportunities for physical intimacy.

Recommendations and conclusions

In the sections above we have outlined the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted social relationships, showing how relational mechanisms key to health have been undermined. While some of the damage might well self-repair after the pandemic, there are opportunities inherent in deliberative efforts to build back in ways that facilitate greater resilience in social and community relationships. We conclude by making three recommendations: one regarding public health responses to the pandemic; and two regarding social recovery.

Recommendation 1: explicitly count the relational cost of public health policies to control the pandemic

Effective handling of a pandemic recognises that social, economic and health concerns are intricately interwoven. It is clear that future research and policy attention must focus on the social consequences. As described above, policies which restrict physical mixing across households carry heavy and unequal relational costs. These include for individuals (eg, loss of intimate touch), dyads (eg, loss of warmth, comfort), networks (eg, restricted access to support) and communities (eg, loss of cohesion and identity). Such costs—and their unequal impact—should not be ignored in short-term efforts to control an epidemic. Some public health responses—restrictions on international holiday travel and highly efficient test and trace systems—have relatively small relational costs and should be prioritised. At a national level, an earlier move to proportionate restrictions, and investment in effective test and trace systems, may help prevent escalation of spread to the point where a national lockdown or tight restrictions became an inevitability. Where policies with relational costs are unavoidable, close attention should be paid to the unequal relational impact for those whose personal circumstances differ from normative assumptions of two adult families. This includes consideration of whether expectations are fair (eg, for those who live alone), whether restrictions on social events are equitable across age group, religious/ethnic groupings and social class, and also to ensure that the language promoted by such policies (eg, households; families) is not exclusionary. 48 49 Forethought to unequal impacts on social relationships should thus be integral to the work of epidemic preparedness teams.

Recommendation 2: intelligently balance online and offline ways of relating

A key ingredient for well-being is ‘getting together’ in a physical sense. This is fundamental to a human need for intimate touch, physical comfort, reinforcing interactional norms and providing practical support. Emerging evidence suggests that online ways of relating cannot simply replace physical interactions. But online interaction has many benefits and for some it offers connections that did not exist previously. In particular, online platforms provide new forms of support for those unable to access offline services because of mobility issues (eg, older people) or because they are geographically isolated from their support community (eg, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth). Ultimately, multiple forms of online and offline social interactions are required to meet the needs of varying groups of people (eg, LGBTQ, older people). Future research and practice should aim to establish ways of using offline and online support in complementary and even synergistic ways, rather than veering between them as social restrictions expand and contract. Intelligent balancing of online and offline ways of relating also pertains to future policies on home and flexible working. A decision to switch to wholesale or obligatory homeworking should consider the risk to relational ‘group properties’ of the workplace community and their impact on employees’ well-being, focusing in particular on unequal impacts (eg, new vs established employees). Intelligent blending of online and in-person working is required to achieve flexibility while also nurturing supportive networks at work. Intelligent balance also implies strategies to build digital literacy and minimise digital exclusion, as well as coproducing solutions with intended beneficiaries.

Recommendation 3: build stronger and sustainable localised communities

In balancing offline and online ways of interacting, there is opportunity to capitalise on the potential for more localised, coherent communities due to scaled-down travel, homeworking and local focus that will ideally continue after restrictions end. There are potential economic benefits after the pandemic, such as increased trade as home workers use local resources (eg, coffee shops), but also relational benefits from stronger relationships around the orbit of the home and neighbourhood. Experience from previous crises shows that community volunteer efforts generated early on will wane over time in the absence of deliberate work to maintain them. Adequately funded partnerships between local government, third sector and community groups are required to sustain community assets that began as a direct response to the pandemic. Such partnerships could work to secure green spaces and indoor (non-commercial) meeting spaces that promote community interaction. Green spaces in particular provide a triple benefit in encouraging physical activity and mental health, as well as facilitating social bonding. 50 In building local communities, small community networks—that allow for diversity and break down ingroup/outgroup views—may be more helpful than the concept of ‘support bubbles’, which are exclusionary and less sustainable in the longer term. Rigorously designed intervention and evaluation—taking a systems approach—will be crucial in ensuring scale-up and sustainability.

The dramatic change to social interaction necessitated by efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 created stark challenges but also opportunities. Our essay highlights opportunities for learning, both to ensure the equity and humanity of physical restrictions, and to sustain the salutogenic effects of social relationships going forward. The starting point for capitalising on this learning is recognition of the disruption to relational mechanisms as a key part of the socioeconomic and health impact of the pandemic. In recovery planning, a general rule is that what is good for decreasing health inequalities (such as expanding social protection and public services and pursuing green inclusive growth strategies) 4 will also benefit relationships and safeguard relational mechanisms for future generations. Putting this into action will require political will.

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Twitter @karenmaxSPHSU, @Mark_McCann, @Rwilsonlowe, @KMitchinGlasgow

Contributors EL and KM led on the manuscript conceptualisation, review and editing. SP, KM, CB, RBP, RL, MM, JR, KS and RW-L contributed to drafting and revising the article. All authors assisted in revising the final draft.

Funding The research reported in this publication was supported by the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00022/1, MC_UU_00022/3) and the Chief Scientist Office (SPHSU11, SPHSU14). EL is also supported by MRC Skills Development Fellowship Award (MR/S015078/1). KS and MM are also supported by a Medical Research Council Strategic Award (MC_PC_13027).

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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Things we learned to appreciate more during covid-19 lockdown, curfews helped tomislav’s family appreciate the value of living in an intergenerational household and spending quality time together.

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The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is of a scale most people alive today have never seen. Lockdowns and curfews to contain the spread of the virus impacted the way children learn, the way their families earn a living, and how safe they feel in their homes and communities. Despite the ongoing threat, countries around the world are starting to lift restrictions. As we question whether we will ever go back to what we once knew to be “normal”, its worth taken a step back to see how we can build on what we have learned to build back a better world for children.

As a journalist, UNICEF photographer Tomislav Georgiev was one of the rare professionals with a permit to go out during the curfews and capture images of the deserted streets of the capital. But he discovered that in times like this, the most valuable images can be found closer to home. He turned his lenses from the outside world to capture photos of his own family with a loving eye. In a household where four generations live together, Tomislav captured scenes of play, family celebrations, sharing, exploring and learning new skills.

“I realized that no matter how much time we think we have; at the end of the day, what I came to appreciate was that we simply don’t spend enough quality time with our families,” says Tomislav.

Days in lockdown were an opportunity for children to reinvent ways of play and learning,  exploring their immediate environment and making the most of what they had available. Building resilience in children is one way we help them to cope in difficult moments.

Curfews were also a time to help children learn responsibility and their role in contributing in   our own way to find a solution to collective problems. “The silent understanding of my children was simply astonishing. We stay home, no questions asked, no demands to go and play with friends. Their lives have completely changed, yet they seem to grasp the importance of their contribution better than most adults,” says Tomislav.

During curfews many learned about the importance of being creative with the scarce resources and limited physical space they had at home. Also, many came to appreciate that small acts of kindness and gratitude to other family members helps to boost emotional wellbeing.

Some even learned new skills but what matters most is learning to appreciate the emotional connections made between different generations.  Its these connections that help us to develop the emotional resilience’s we need to get through stressful times.

“It is true – this crisis has taken its toll on humanity. However, it also provided an opportunity for generations to unite and perhaps begun to shape our younger generations to think differently about their own individual roles and how we as individuals can all contribute in our own way to find a solution to collective problems,” says Tomislav.

UNICEF remains committed to its mission to provide essential support, protection and information as well as hope of a brighter day for every child. UNICEF stands united with one clear promise to the world: we will get through this together, for every child .

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Ministry of Health, USAID, UNICEF and WHO launch “Protected Together – Vaccines Work” Information and Vaccination Caravan

Children cannot afford prolonged disruptions to learning

COVID-19 vaccine caravan brings information and vaccines closer to citizens

Ministry of Health supported by WHO, UNICEF and USAID is organizing a caravan to bring COVID-19 information and vaccines closer to citizens

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Why lockdown and distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to increase the social class achievement gap

• Sébastien Goudeau   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7293-0977 1 ,
• Camille Sanrey   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3158-1306 1 ,
• Arnaud Stanczak   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2596-1516 2 ,
• Antony Manstead   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7540-2096 3 &
• Céline Darnon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2613-689X 2  

Nature Human Behaviour volume  5 ,  pages 1273–1281 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced teachers and parents to quickly adapt to a new educational context: distance learning. Teachers developed online academic material while parents taught the exercises and lessons provided by teachers to their children at home. Considering that the use of digital tools in education has dramatically increased during this crisis, and it is set to continue, there is a pressing need to understand the impact of distance learning. Taking a multidisciplinary view, we argue that by making the learning process rely more than ever on families, rather than on teachers, and by getting students to work predominantly via digital resources, school closures exacerbate social class academic disparities. To address this burning issue, we propose an agenda for future research and outline recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers to limit the impact of the lockdown on social-class-based academic inequality.

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The widespread effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2019–2020 have drastically increased health, social and economic inequalities 1 , 2 . For more than 900 million learners around the world, the pandemic led to the closure of schools and universities 3 . This exceptional situation forced teachers, parents and students to quickly adapt to a new educational context: distance learning. Teachers had to develop online academic materials that could be used at home to ensure educational continuity while ensuring the necessary physical distancing. Primary and secondary school students suddenly had to work with various kinds of support, which were usually provided online by their teachers. For college students, lockdown often entailed returning to their hometowns while staying connected with their teachers and classmates via video conferences, email and other digital tools. Despite the best efforts of educational institutions, parents and teachers to keep all children and students engaged in learning activities, ensuring educational continuity during school closure—something that is difficult for everyone—may pose unique material and psychological challenges for working-class families and students.

Not only did the pandemic lead to the closure of schools in many countries, often for several weeks, it also accelerated the digitalization of education and amplified the role of parental involvement in supporting the schoolwork of their children. Thus, beyond the specific circumstances of the COVID-19 lockdown, we believe that studying the effects of the pandemic on academic inequalities provides a way to more broadly examine the consequences of school closure and related effects (for example, digitalization of education) on social class inequalities. Indeed, bearing in mind that (1) the risk of further pandemics is higher than ever (that is, we are in a ‘pandemic era’ 4 , 5 ) and (2) beyond pandemics, the use of digital tools in education (and therefore the influence of parental involvement) has dramatically increased during this crisis, and is set to continue, there is a pressing need for an integrative and comprehensive model that examines the consequences of distance learning. Here, we propose such an integrative model that helps us to understand the extent to which the school closures associated with the pandemic amplify economic, digital and cultural divides that in turn affect the psychological functioning of parents, students and teachers in a way that amplifies academic inequalities. Bringing together research in social sciences, ranging from economics and sociology to social, cultural, cognitive and educational psychology, we argue that by getting students to work predominantly via digital resources rather than direct interactions with their teachers, and by making the learning process rely more than ever on families rather than teachers, school closures exacerbate social class academic disparities.

First, we review research showing that social class is associated with unequal access to digital tools, unequal familiarity with digital skills and unequal uses of such tools for learning purposes 6 , 7 . We then review research documenting how unequal familiarity with school culture, knowledge and skills can also contribute to the accentuation of academic inequalities 8 , 9 . Next, we present the results of surveys conducted during the 2020 lockdown showing that the quality and quantity of pedagogical support received from schools varied according to the social class of families (for examples, see refs. 10 , 11 , 12 ). We then argue that these digital, cultural and structural divides represent barriers to the ability of parents to provide appropriate support for children during distance learning (Fig. 1 ). These divides also alter the levels of self-efficacy of parents and children, thereby affecting their engagement in learning activities 13 , 14 . In the final section, we review preliminary evidence for the hypothesis that distance learning widens the social class achievement gap and we propose an agenda for future research. In addition, we outline recommendations that should help parents, teachers and policymakers to use social science research to limit the impact of school closure and distance learning on the social class achievement gap.

Economic, structural, digital and cultural divides influence the psychological functioning of parents and students in a way that amplify inequalities.

The digital divide

Unequal access to digital resources.

Although the use of digital technologies is almost ubiquitous in developed nations, there is a digital divide such that some people are more likely than others to be numerically excluded 15 (Fig. 1 ). Social class is a strong predictor of digital disparities, including the quality of hardware, software and Internet access 16 , 17 , 18 . For example, in 2019, in France, around 1 in 5 working-class families did not have personal access to the Internet compared with less than 1 in 20 of the most privileged families 19 . Similarly, in 2020, in the United Kingdom, 20% of children who were eligible for free school meals did not have access to a computer at home compared with 7% of other children 20 . In 2021, in the United States, 41% of working-class families do not own a laptop or desktop computer and 43% do not have broadband compared with 8% and 7%, respectively, of upper/middle-class Americans 21 . A similar digital gap is also evident between lower-income and higher-income countries 22 .

Second, simply having access to a computer and an Internet connection does not ensure effective distance learning. For example, many of the educational resources sent by teachers need to be printed, thereby requiring access to printers. Moreover, distance learning is more difficult in households with only one shared computer compared with those where each family member has their own 23 . Furthermore, upper/middle-class families are more likely to be able to guarantee a suitable workspace for each child than their working-class counterparts 24 .

In the context of school closures, such disparities are likely to have important consequences for educational continuity. In line with this idea, a survey of approximately 4,000 parents in the United Kingdom confirmed that during lockdown, more than half of primary school children from the poorest families did not have access to their own study space and were less well equipped for distance learning than higher-income families 10 . Similarly, a survey of around 1,300 parents in the Netherlands found that during lockdown, children from working-class families had fewer computers at home and less room to study than upper/middle-class children 11 .

Data from non-Western countries highlight a more general digital divide, showing that developing countries have poorer access to digital equipment. For example, in India in 2018, only 10.7% of households possessed a digital device 25 , while in Pakistan in 2020, 31% of higher-education teachers did not have Internet access and 68.4% did not have a laptop 26 . In general, developing countries lack access to digital technologies 27 , 28 , and these difficulties of access are even greater in rural areas (for example, see ref. 29 ). Consequently, school closures have huge repercussions for the continuity of learning in these countries. For example, in India in 2018, only 11% of the rural and 40% of the urban population above 14 years old could use a computer and access the Internet 25 . Time spent on education during school closure decreased by 80% in Bangladesh 30 . A similar trend was observed in other countries 31 , with only 22% of children engaging in remote learning in Kenya 32 and 50% in Burkina Faso 33 . In Ghana, 26–32% of children spent no time at all on learning during the pandemic 34 . Beyond the overall digital divide, social class disparities are also evident in developing countries, with lower access to digital resources among households in which parental educational levels were low (versus households in which parental educational levels were high; for example, see ref. 35 for Nigeria and ref. 31 for Ecuador).

Unequal digital skills

In addition to unequal access to digital tools, there are also systematic variations in digital skills 36 , 37 (Fig. 1 ). Upper/middle-class families are more familiar with digital tools and resources and are therefore more likely to have the digital skills needed for distance learning 38 , 39 , 40 . These digital skills are particularly useful during school closures, both for students and for parents, for organizing, retrieving and correctly using the resources provided by the teachers (for example, sending or receiving documents by email, printing documents or using word processors).

Social class disparities in digital skills can be explained in part by the fact that children from upper/middle-class families have the opportunity to develop digital skills earlier than working-class families 41 . In member countries of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), only 23% of working-class children had started using a computer at the age of 6 years or earlier compared with 43% of upper/middle-class children 42 . Moreover, because working-class people tend to persist less than upper/middle-class people when confronted with digital difficulties 23 , the use of digital tools and resources for distance learning may interfere with the ability of parents to help children with their schoolwork.

Unequal use of digital tools

A third level of digital divide concerns variations in digital tool use 18 , 43 (Fig. 1 ). Upper/middle-class families are more likely to use digital resources for work and education 6 , 41 , 44 , whereas working-class families are more likely to use these resources for entertainment, such as electronic games or social media 6 , 45 . This divide is also observed among students, whereby working-class students tend to use digital technologies for leisure activities, whereas their upper/middle-class peers are more likely to use them for academic activities 46 and to consider that computers and the Internet provide an opportunity for education and training 23 . Furthermore, working-class families appear to regulate the digital practices of their children less 47 and are more likely to allow screens in the bedrooms of children and teenagers without setting limits on times or practices 48 .

In sum, inequalities in terms of digital resources, skills and use have strong implications for distance learning. This is because they make working-class students and parents particularly vulnerable when learning relies on extensive use of digital devices rather than on face-to-face interaction with teachers.

The cultural divide

Even if all three levels of digital divide were closed, upper/middle-class families would still be better prepared than working-class families to ensure educational continuity for their children. Upper/middle-class families are more familiar with the academic knowledge and skills that are expected and valued in educational settings, as well as with the independent, autonomous way of learning that is valued in the school culture and becomes even more important during school closure (Fig. 1 ).

Unequal familiarity with academic knowledge and skills

According to classical social reproduction theory 8 , 49 , school is not a neutral place in which all forms of language and knowledge are equally valued. Academic contexts expect and value culture-specific and taken-for-granted forms of knowledge, skills and ways of being, thinking and speaking that are more in tune with those developed through upper/middle-class socialization (that is, ‘cultural capital’ 8 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ). For instance, academic contexts value interest in the arts, museums and literature 54 , 55 , a type of interest that is more likely to develop through socialization in upper/middle-class families than in working-class socialization 54 , 56 . Indeed, upper/middle-class parents are more likely than working-class parents to engage in activities that develop this cultural capital. For example, they possess more books and cultural objects at home, read more stories to their children and visit museums and libraries more often (for examples, see refs. 51 , 54 , 55 ). Upper/middle-class children are also more involved in extra-curricular activities (for example, playing a musical instrument) than working-class children 55 , 56 , 57 .

Beyond this implicit familiarization with the school curriculum, upper/middle-class parents more often organize educational activities that are explicitly designed to develop academic skills of their children 57 , 58 , 59 . For example, they are more likely to monitor and re-explain lessons or use games and textbooks to develop and reinforce academic skills (for example, labelling numbers, letters or colours 57 , 60 ). Upper/middle-class parents also provide higher levels of support and spend more time helping children with homework than working-class parents (for examples, see refs. 61 , 62 ). Thus, even if all parents are committed to the academic success of their children, working-class parents have fewer chances to provide the help that children need to complete homework 63 , and homework is more beneficial for children from upper-middle class families than for children from working-class families 64 , 65 .

School closures amplify the impact of cultural inequalities

The trends described above have been observed in ‘normal’ times when schools are open. School closures, by making learning rely more strongly on practices implemented at home (rather than at school), are likely to amplify the impact of these disparities. Consistent with this idea, research has shown that the social class achievement gap usually greatly widens during school breaks—a phenomenon described as ‘summer learning loss’ or ‘summer setback’ 66 , 67 , 68 . During holidays, the learning by children tends to decline, and this is particularly pronounced in children from working-class families. Consequently, the social class achievement gap grows more rapidly during the summer months than it does in the rest of the year. This phenomenon is partly explained by the fact that during the break from school, social class disparities in investment in activities that are beneficial for academic achievement (for example, reading, travelling to a foreign country or museum visits) are more pronounced.

Therefore, when they are out of school, children from upper/middle-class backgrounds may continue to develop academic skills unlike their working-class counterparts, who may stagnate or even regress. Research also indicates that learning loss during school breaks tends to be cumulative 66 . Thus, repeated episodes of school closure are likely to have profound consequences for the social class achievement gap. Consistent with the idea that school closures could lead to similar processes as those identified during summer breaks, a recent survey indicated that during the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom, children from upper/middle-class families spent more time on educational activities (5.8 h per day) than those from working-class families (4.5 h per day) 7 , 69 .

Unequal dispositions for autonomy and self-regulation

School closures have encouraged autonomous work among students. This ‘independent’ way of studying is compatible with the family socialization of upper/middle-class students, but does not match the interdependent norms more commonly associated with working-class contexts 9 . Upper/middle-class contexts tend to promote cultural norms of independence whereby individuals perceive themselves as autonomous actors, independent of other individuals and of the social context, able to pursue their own goals 70 . For example, upper/middle-class parents tend to invite children to express their interests, preferences and opinions during the various activities of everyday life 54 , 55 . Conversely, in working-class contexts characterized by low economic resources and where life is more uncertain, individuals tend to perceive themselves as interdependent, connected to others and members of social groups 53 , 70 , 71 . This interdependent self-construal fits less well with the independent culture of academic contexts. This cultural mismatch between interdependent self-construal common in working-class students and the independent norms of the educational institution has negative consequences for academic performance 9 .

Once again, the impact of these differences is likely to be amplified during school closures, when being able to work alone and autonomously is especially useful. The requirement to work alone is more likely to match the independent self-construal of upper/middle-class students than the interdependent self-construal of working-class students. In the case of working-class students, this mismatch is likely to increase their difficulties in working alone at home. Supporting our argument, recent research has shown that working-class students tend to underachieve in contexts where students work individually compared with contexts where students work with others 72 . Similarly, during school closures, high self-regulation skills (for example, setting goals, selecting appropriate learning strategies and maintaining motivation 73 ) are required to maintain study activities and are likely to be especially useful for using digital resources efficiently. Research has shown that students from working-class backgrounds typically develop their self-regulation skills to a lesser extent than those from upper/middle-class backgrounds 74 , 75 , 76 .

Interestingly, some authors have suggested that independent (versus interdependent) self-construal may also affect communication with teachers 77 . Indeed, in the context of distance learning, working-class families are less likely to respond to the communication of teachers because their ‘interdependent’ self leads them to respect hierarchies, and thus perceive teachers as an expert who ‘can be trusted to make the right decisions for learning’. Upper/middle class families, relying on ‘independent’ self-construal, are more inclined to seek individualized feedback, and therefore tend to participate to a greater extent in exchanges with teachers. Such cultural differences are important because they can also contribute to the difficulties encountered by working-class families.

The structural divide: unequal support from schools

The issues reviewed thus far all increase the vulnerability of children and students from underprivileged backgrounds when schools are closed. To offset these disadvantages, it might be expected that the school should increase its support by providing additional resources for working-class students. However, recent data suggest that differences in the material and human resources invested in providing educational support for children during periods of school closure were—paradoxically—in favour of upper/middle-class students (Fig. 1 ). In England, for example, upper/middle-class parents reported benefiting from online classes and video-conferencing with teachers more often than working-class parents 10 . Furthermore, active help from school (for example, online teaching, private tutoring or chats with teachers) occurred more frequently in the richest households (64% of the richest households declared having received help from school) than in the poorest households (47%). Another survey found that in the United Kingdom, upper/middle-class children were more likely to take online lessons every day (30%) than working-class students (16%) 12 . This substantial difference might be due, at least in part, to the fact that private schools are better equipped in terms of online platforms (60% of schools have at least one online platform) than state schools (37%, and 23% in the most deprived schools) and were more likely to organize daily online lessons. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, in schools with a high proportion of students eligible for free school meals, teachers were less inclined to broadcast an online lesson for their pupils 78 . Interestingly, 58% of teachers in the wealthiest areas reported having messaged their students or their students’ parents during lockdown compared with 47% in the most deprived schools. In addition, the probability of children receiving technical support from the school (for example, by providing pupils with laptops or other devices) is, surprisingly, higher in the most advantaged schools than in the most deprived 78 .

In addition to social class disparities, there has been less support from schools for African-American and Latinx students. During school closures in the United States, 40% of African-American students and 30% of Latinx students received no online teaching compared with 10% of white students 79 . Another source of inequality is that the probability of school closure was correlated with social class and race. In the United States, for example, school closures from September to December 2020 were more common in schools with a high proportion of racial/ethnic minority students, who experience homelessness and are eligible for free/discounted school meals 80 .

Similarly, access to educational resources and support was lower in poorer (compared with richer) countries 81 . In sub-Saharan Africa, during lockdown, 45% of children had no exposure at all to any type of remote learning. Of those who did, the medium was mostly radio, television or paper rather than digital. In African countries, at most 10% of children received some material through the Internet. In Latin America, 90% of children received some remote learning, but less than half of that was through the internet—the remainder being via radio and television 81 . In Ecuador, high-school students from the lowest wealth quartile had fewer remote-learning opportunities, such as Google class/Zoom, than students from the highest wealth quartile 31 .

Thus, the achievement gap and its accentuation during lockdown are due not only to the cultural and digital disadvantages of working-class families but also to unequal support from schools. This inequality in school support is not due to teachers being indifferent to or even supportive of social stratification. Rather, we believe that these effects are fundamentally structural. In many countries, schools located in upper/middle-class neighbourhoods have more money than those in the poorest neighbourhoods. Moreover, upper/middle-class parents invest more in the schools of their children than working-class parents (for example, see ref. 82 ), and schools have an interest in catering more for upper/middle-class families than for working-class families 83 . Additionally, the expectation of teachers may be lower for working-class children 84 . For example, they tend to estimate that working-class students invest less effort in learning than their upper/middle-class counterparts 85 . These differences in perception may have influenced the behaviour of teachers during school closure, such that teachers in privileged neighbourhoods provided more information to students because they expected more from them in term of effort and achievement. The fact that upper/middle-class parents are better able than working-class parents to comply with the expectations of teachers (for examples, see refs. 55 , 86 ) may have reinforced this phenomenon. These discrepancies echo data showing that working-class students tend to request less help in their schoolwork than upper/middle-class ones 87 , and they may even avoid asking for help because they believe that such requests could lead to reprimands 88 . During school closures, these students (and their families) may in consequence have been less likely to ask for help and resources. Jointly, these phenomena have resulted in upper/middle-class families receiving more support from schools during lockdown than their working-class counterparts.

Psychological effects of digital, cultural and structural divides

Despite being strongly influenced by social class, differences in academic achievement are often interpreted by parents, teachers and students as reflecting differences in ability 89 . As a result, upper/middle-class students are usually perceived—and perceive themselves—as smarter than working-class students, who are perceived—and perceive themselves—as less intelligent 90 , 91 , 92 or less able to succeed 93 . Working-class students also worry more about the fact that they might perform more poorly than upper/middle-class students 94 , 95 . These fears influence academic learning in important ways. In particular, they can consume cognitive resources when children and students work on academic tasks 96 , 97 . Self-efficacy also plays a key role in engaging in learning and perseverance in the face of difficulties 13 , 98 . In addition, working-class students are those for whom the fear of being outperformed by others is the most negatively related to academic performance 99 .

The fact that working-class children and students are less familiar with the tasks set by teachers, and less well equipped and supported, makes them more likely to experience feelings of incompetence (Fig. 1 ). Working-class parents are also more likely than their upper/middle-class counterparts to feel unable to help their children with schoolwork. Consistent with this, research has shown that both working-class students and parents have lower feelings of academic self-efficacy than their upper/middle-class counterparts 100 , 101 . These differences have been documented under ‘normal’ conditions but are likely to be exacerbated during distance learning. Recent surveys conducted during the school closures have confirmed that upper/middle-class families felt better able to support their children in distance learning than did working-class families 10 and that upper/middle-class parents helped their children more and felt more capable to do so 11 , 12 .

Pandemic disparity, future directions and recommendations

The research reviewed thus far suggests that children and their families are highly unequal with respect to digital access, skills and use. It also shows that upper/middle-class students are more likely to be supported in their homework (by their parents and teachers) than working-class students, and that upper/middle-class students and parents will probably feel better able than working-class ones to adapt to the context of distance learning. For all these reasons, we anticipate that as a result of school closures, the COVID-19 pandemic will substantially increase the social class achievement gap. Because school closures are a recent occurrence, it is too early to measure with precision their effects on the widening of the achievement gap. However, some recent data are consistent with this idea.

Evidence for a widening gap during the pandemic

Comparing academic achievement in 2020 with previous years provides an early indication of the effects of school closures during the pandemic. In France, for example, first and second graders take national evaluations at the beginning of the school year. Initial comparisons of the results for 2020 with those from previous years revealed that the gap between schools classified as ‘priority schools’ (those in low-income urban areas) and schools in higher-income neighbourhoods—a gap observed every year—was particularly pronounced in 2020 in both French and mathematics 102 .

Similarly, in the Netherlands, national assessments take place twice a year. In 2020, they took place both before and after school closures. A recent analysis compared progress during this period in 2020 in mathematics/arithmetic, spelling and reading comprehension for 7–11-year-old students within the same period in the three previous years 103 . Results indicated a general learning loss in 2020. More importantly, for the 8% of working-class children, the losses were 40% greater than they were for upper/middle-class children.

Similar results were observed in Belgium among students attending the final year of primary school. Compared with students from previous cohorts, students affected by school closures experienced a substantial decrease in their mathematics and language scores, with children from more disadvantaged backgrounds experiencing greater learning losses 104 . Likewise, oral reading assessments in more than 100 school districts in the United States showed that the development of this skill among children in second and third grade significantly slowed between Spring and Autumn 2020, but this slowdown was more pronounced in schools from lower-achieving districts 105 .

It is likely that school closures have also amplified racial disparities in learning and achievement. For example, in the United States, after the first lockdown, students of colour lost the equivalent of 3–5 months of learning, whereas white students were about 1–3 months behind. Moreover, in the Autumn, when some students started to return to classrooms, African-American and Latinx students were more likely to continue distance learning, despite being less likely to have access to the digital tools, Internet access and live contact with teachers 106 .

In some African countries (for example, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania and Uganda), the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in learning loss ranging from 6 months to more 1 year 107 , and this learning loss appears to be greater for working-class children (that is, those attending no-fee schools) than for upper/middle-class children 108 .

These findings show that school closures have exacerbated achievement gaps linked to social class and ethnicity. However, more research is needed to address the question of whether school closures differentially affect the learning of students from working- and upper/middle-class families.

Future directions

First, to assess the specific and unique impact of school closures on student learning, longitudinal research should compare student achievement at different times of the year, before, during and after school closures, as has been done to document the summer learning loss 66 , 109 . In the coming months, alternating periods of school closure and opening may occur, thereby presenting opportunities to do such research. This would also make it possible to examine whether the gap diminishes a few weeks after children return to in-school learning or whether, conversely, it increases with time because the foundations have not been sufficiently acquired to facilitate further learning 110 .

Second, the mechanisms underlying the increase in social class disparities during school closures should be examined. As discussed above, school closures result in situations for which students are unevenly prepared and supported. It would be appropriate to seek to quantify the contribution of each of the factors that might be responsible for accentuating the social class achievement gap. In particular, distinguishing between factors that are relatively ‘controllable’ (for example, resources made available to pupils) and those that are more difficult to control (for example, the self-efficacy of parents in supporting the schoolwork of their children) is essential to inform public policy and teaching practices.

Third, existing studies are based on general comparisons and very few provide insights into the actual practices that took place in families during school closure and how these practices affected the achievement gap. For example, research has documented that parents from working-class backgrounds are likely to find it more difficult to help their children to complete homework and to provide constructive feedback 63 , 111 , something that could in turn have a negative impact on the continuity of learning of their children. In addition, it seems reasonable to assume that during lockdown, parents from upper/middle-class backgrounds encouraged their children to engage in practices that, even if not explicitly requested by teachers, would be beneficial to learning (for example, creative activities or reading). Identifying the practices that best predict the maintenance or decline of educational achievement during school closures would help identify levers for intervention.

Finally, it would be interesting to investigate teaching practices during school closures. The lockdown in the spring of 2020 was sudden and unexpected. Within a few days, teachers had to find a way to compensate for the school closure, which led to highly variable practices. Some teachers posted schoolwork on platforms, others sent it by email, some set work on a weekly basis while others set it day by day. Some teachers also set up live sessions in large or small groups, providing remote meetings for questions and support. There have also been variations in the type of feedback given to students, notably through the monitoring and correcting of work. Future studies should examine in more detail what practices schools and teachers used to compensate for the school closures and their effects on widening, maintaining or even reducing the gap, as has been done for certain specific literacy programmes 112 as well as specific instruction topics (for example, ecology and evolution 113 ).

Practical recommendations

We are aware of the debate about whether social science research on COVID-19 is suitable for making policy decisions 114 , and we draw attention to the fact that some of our recommendations (Table 1 ) are based on evidence from experiments or interventions carried out pre-COVID while others are more speculative. In any case, we emphasize that these suggestions should be viewed with caution and be tested in future research. Some of our recommendations could be implemented in the event of new school closures, others only when schools re-open. We also acknowledge that while these recommendations are intended for parents and teachers, their implementation largely depends on the adoption of structural policies. Importantly, given all the issues discussed above, we emphasize the importance of prioritizing, wherever possible, in-person learning over remote learning 115 and where this is not possible, of implementing strong policies to support distance learning, especially for disadvantaged families.

Where face-to face teaching is not possible and teachers are responsible for implementing distance learning, it will be important to make them aware of the factors that can exacerbate inequalities during lockdown and to provide them with guidance about practices that would reduce these inequalities. Thus, there is an urgent need for interventions aimed at making teachers aware of the impact of the social class of children and families on the following factors: (1) access to, familiarity with and use of digital devices; (2) familiarity with academic knowledge and skills; and (3) preparedness to work autonomously. Increasing awareness of the material, cultural and psychological barriers that working-class children and families face during lockdown should increase the quality and quantity of the support provided by teachers and thereby positively affect the achievements of working-class students.

In addition to increasing the awareness of teachers of these barriers, teachers should be encouraged to adjust the way they communicate with working-class families due to differences in self-construal compared with upper/middle-class families 77 . For example, questions about family (rather than personal) well-being would be congruent with interdependent self-construals. This should contribute to better communication and help keep a better track of the progress of students during distance learning.

It is also necessary to help teachers to engage in practices that have a chance of reducing inequalities 53 , 116 . Particularly important is that teachers and schools ensure that homework can be done by all children, for example, by setting up organizations that would help children whose parents are not in a position to monitor or assist with the homework of their children. Options include homework help groups and tutoring by teachers after class. When schools are open, the growing tendency to set homework through digital media should be resisted as far as possible given the evidence we have reviewed above. Moreover, previous research has underscored the importance of homework feedback provided by teachers, which is positively related to the amount of homework completed and predictive of academic performance 117 . Where homework is web-based, it has also been shown that feedback on web-based homework enhances the learning of students 118 . It therefore seems reasonable to predict that the social class achievement gap will increase more slowly (or even remain constant or be reversed) in schools that establish individualized monitoring of students, by means of regular calls and feedback on homework, compared with schools where the support provided to pupils is more generic.

Given that learning during lockdown has increasingly taken place in family settings, we believe that interventions involving the family are also likely to be effective 119 , 120 , 121 . Simply providing families with suitable material equipment may be insufficient. Families should be given training in the efficient use of digital technology and pedagogical support. This would increase the self-efficacy of parents and students, with positive consequences for achievement. Ideally, such training would be delivered in person to avoid problems arising from the digital divide. Where this is not possible, individualized online tutoring should be provided. For example, studies conducted during the lockdown in Botswana and Italy have shown that individual online tutoring directly targeting either parents or students in middle school has a positive impact on the achievement of students, particularly for working-class students 122 , 123 .

Interventions targeting families should also address the psychological barriers faced by working-class families and children. Some interventions have already been designed and been shown to be effective in reducing the social class achievement gap, particularly in mathematics and language 124 , 125 , 126 . For example, research showed that an intervention designed to train low-income parents in how to support the mathematical development of their pre-kindergarten children (including classes and access to a library of kits to use at home) increased the quality of support provided by the parents, with a corresponding impact on the development of mathematical knowledge of their children. Such interventions should be particularly beneficial in the context of school closure.

Beyond its impact on academic performance and inequalities, the COVID-19 crisis has shaken the economies of countries around the world, casting millions of families around the world into poverty 127 , 128 , 129 . As noted earlier, there has been a marked increase in economic inequalities, bringing with it all the psychological and social problems that such inequalities create 130 , 131 , especially for people who live in scarcity 132 . The increase in educational inequalities is just one facet of the many difficulties that working-class families will encounter in the coming years, but it is one that could seriously limit the chances of their children escaping from poverty by reducing their opportunities for upward mobility. In this context, it should be a priority to concentrate resources on the most deprived students. A large proportion of the poorest households do not own a computer and do not have personal access to the Internet, which has important consequences for distance learning. During school closures, it is therefore imperative to provide such families with adequate equipment and Internet service, as was done in some countries in spring 2020. Even if the provision of such equipment is not in itself sufficient, it is a necessary condition for ensuring pedagogical continuity during lockdown.

Finally, after prolonged periods of school closure, many students may not have acquired the skills needed to pursue their education. A possible consequence would be an increase in the number of students for whom teachers recommend class repetitions. Class repetitions are contentious. On the one hand, class repetition more frequently affects working-class children and is not efficient in terms of learning improvement 133 . On the other hand, accepting lower standards of academic achievement or even suspending the practice of repeating a class could lead to pupils pursuing their education without mastering the key abilities needed at higher grades. This could create difficulties in subsequent years and, in this sense, be counterproductive. We therefore believe that the most appropriate way to limit the damage of the pandemic would be to help children catch up rather than allowing them to continue without mastering the necessary skills. As is being done in some countries, systematic remedial courses (for example, summer learning programmes) should be organized and financially supported following periods of school closure, with priority given to pupils from working-class families. Such interventions have genuine potential in that research has shown that participation in remedial summer programmes is effective in reducing learning loss during the summer break 134 , 135 , 136 . For example, in one study 137 , 438 students from high-poverty schools were offered a multiyear summer school programme that included various pedagogical and enrichment activities (for example, science investigation and music) and were compared with a ‘no-treatment’ control group. Students who participated in the summer programme progressed more than students in the control group. A meta-analysis 138 of 41 summer learning programmes (that is, classroom- and home-based summer interventions) involving children from kindergarten to grade 8 showed that these programmes had significantly larger benefits for children from working-class families. Although such measures are costly, the cost is small compared to the price of failing to fulfil the academic potential of many students simply because they were not born into upper/middle-class families.

The unprecedented nature of the current pandemic means that we lack strong data on what the school closure period is likely to produce in terms of learning deficits and the reproduction of social inequalities. However, the research discussed in this article suggests that there are good reasons to predict that this period of school closures will accelerate the reproduction of social inequalities in educational achievement.

By making school learning less dependent on teachers and more dependent on families and digital tools and resources, school closures are likely to greatly amplify social class inequalities. At a time when many countries are experiencing second, third or fourth waves of the pandemic, resulting in fresh periods of local or general lockdowns, systematic efforts to test these predictions are urgently needed along with steps to reduce the impact of school closures on the social class achievement gap.

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We thank G. Reis for editing the figure. The writing of this manuscript was supported by grant ANR-19-CE28-0007–PRESCHOOL from the French National Research Agency (S.G.).

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Goudeau, S., Sanrey, C., Stanczak, A. et al. Why lockdown and distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to increase the social class achievement gap. Nat Hum Behav 5 , 1273–1281 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01212-7

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