How does social distancing during COVID-19 affect negative moods and memory?

ABSTRACT

In the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment, the current best defence against COVID-19 is social distancing – staying at home as much as possible, keeping distance from others, and avoiding large gatherings. Although social distancing improves physical health in terms of helping to reduce viral transmission, its psychological consequences are less clear, particularly its effects on memory. In this research, we investigated the effect of social distancing duration on negative moods and memory. The relation between social distancing duration and both negative mood and memory errors followed the same U-shaped function: negative moods and memory errors initially decreased as social distancing duration increased, and then at approximately 30 days, they began to increase. Subsequent analyses indicated that memory errors were mediated by lonely mood in particular. Thus, short-term social distancing might benefit psychological well-being and memory performance, but extended social distancing has a negative impact on mood and memory.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• social distancing
• false memory
• negative mood
• social isolation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We also conducted a series of linear and quadratic regressions controlling for participants’ age and gender. The results are consistent with the regression results without controlling for age and gender. The same consistency was also observed for the analyses in the following sections.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund [grant number 18-UOO-014].