Feeling lonely during the pandemic: Towards personality-tailored risk profiles

ABSTRACT

This is the first study to disentangle associations of within- and between-person fluctuations in loneliness and their effect on evening mood during a nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19. To contribute to the development of personality-tailored risk profiles, we additionally explored the moderating role of trait neuroticism and extraversion on the association of within- and between-person loneliness and mood. We employed an ambulatory assessment design during 21 days of nationwide lockdown in Germany (13/04/2020-03/05/2020) with two interval-based assessments. The final sample comprised 322 participants (74.5% women) aged between 15 and 82 years (M = 30.7, SD = 14.9) providing 6,084 evening assessments. Linear mixed models were used to evaluate the effects of within- and between-person fluctuations in loneliness on evening mood while controlling for unspecific effects of time, sex, and age. Moderation analysis was used to investigate the influence of neuroticism and extraversion on the relation between loneliness and mood, respectively. Results indicate that especially higher between-person loneliness (i.e. participants felt lonelier compared to the average participant) but also higher within-person loneliness (i.e. participants felt lonelier compared to their individual mean) were associated with a more unpleasant mood. Neuroticism augmented the effect of within-person loneliness, while extraversion seemed to buffer the effect of between-person loneliness on mood. Our findings underline the importance of carefully monitoring loneliness during COVID-19. The findings contribute towards the development of personality-tailored risk profiles (e.g. among newly arising risk groups for loneliness due to COVID-19). We discuss how the differential consideration of within- and between-psychological processes might help to elucidate currently mixed findings on psychological coping during the COVID-19 pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• loneliness
• personality-tailored risk profiles
• ambulatory assessment
• daily mood

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Research Initiative of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (Forschungsinitiative Rheinland-Pfalz).

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The dataset and analysis script will be made available upon request.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The cutoff response time was determined by conducting a pilot study in which research assistants were asked to provide valid answers as quickly as possible. The minimum response time was 1.56s/item on average for the evening survey (and 1.17s/item on average for the morning survey).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.