Boston College daily sleep and well-being survey data during early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic

Examining Measurement Invariance in the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 Brief Form Across Sexual and Gender Minority Status

The Personality Inventory for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Brief Form (PID-5-BF) was developed with an assumption of invariance across sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals. This assumption has yet to be tested empirically. Using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, we examined measurement invariance in the PID-5-BF across the SGM status in clinical (N = 1,174; n = 254 SGM) and nonclinical (N = 1,456; n = 151 SGM) samples. Measurement invariance was supported for the PID-5-BF structure, item thresholds, and factor loadings, but not at the item intercept level. SGM individuals endorsed higher negative affectivity, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism domains in both samples. In the clinical sample, adjusting for partial invariance decreased detachment and antagonism levels for SGM persons. In the nonclinical sample, adjusting for partial invariance reduced antagonism disparities in the SGM group, even rendering original group differences null. Our results support the use of the PID-5-BF in SGM populations but indicate that some measurement bias may drive observed disparities in maladaptive trait domains and, in turn, personality disorder diagnosis.

The influence of emotion regulation strategies and sleep quality on depression and anxiety

Chronic stress is a major risk factor for a number of mental health disorders, including depression and pathological anxiety. Adaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategies (i.e. positively-focused thought processes) can help to prevent psychiatric disturbance when enduring unpleasant and stressful experiences, but little is known about the inter-individual factors that govern their success. Sleep plays an important role in mental health, and may moderate the effectiveness of adaptive CER strategies by maintaining the executive functions on which they rely. In this study, we carried out a secondary analysis of self-reported mental health and sleep data acquired during a protracted and naturally-occurring stressor - the COVID-19 pandemic - to firstly test the hypothesis that adaptive CER strategy use is associated with positive mental health outcomes and secondly, that the benefits of adaptive CER strategy use for mental health are contingent on high-quality sleep. Using established self-report tools, participants estimated their depression (N = 551) and anxiety (N = 590)2 levels, sleep quality and tendency to engage in adaptive and maladaptive CER strategies during the Spring and Autumn of 2020. Using a linear mixed modelling approach, we found that greater use of adaptive CER strategies and higher sleep quality were independently associated with lower self-reported depression and anxiety. However, adaptive CER strategy use was not a significant predictor of self-reported anxiety when accounting for sleep quality in our final model. The positive influence of adaptive CER strategy use on depression was observed at different levels of sleep quality. These findings highlight the importance of adaptive CER strategy use and good sleep quality in promoting resilience to depression and anxiety when experiencing chronic stress.

Perceived event resolution-rather than time-allows older adults to reduce the negativity of their memories

In addition to showing greater memory positivity soon after negative events, older adults can be more likely than younger adults to show decreases in memory negativity as events grow more distant. We recently showed that this latter effect was not present when adults were asked to rate memories of the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-May 2020): after a short (June/July 2020) and long delay (October/November 2020), older age was associated with greater reflections on positive aspects, but with no difference in negative aspects. We suggested that older adults did not show decreased negativity because the pandemic was still prevalent in their daily lives. The present study examines whether perceived event resolution-rather than time on its own-may be necessary to show age-related decreases in negativity by surveying participants during a time when many may have felt like the pandemic had resolved (Summer 2021). Once again, age was associated with increased ratings of the positive aspects, but at this timepoint, age was also associated with decreased ratings of the negative aspects. These results suggest that older adults may more successfully decrease the negativity of their memories compared to younger adults only when they feel that events have resolved.

Empathy, memory, and aging during the COVID-19 pandemic

Recently, there has been increasing attention to the interaction between empathy and memory. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when empathy played a key role in people's behaviors, we assessed the relationship between empathy and memory. In this pre-registered report, we used memory accuracy for the number of COVID-19 cases as a measure of recent memory and examined its relationship with trait empathy. Moreover, we investigated whether cognitive vs. affective empathy differently associate with one's memory for the number of COVID-19 cases, given evidence for distinct mechanisms for the two aspects of empathy. Finally, we assessed how age is related to empathy-memory associations. To address these questions, we used the Boston College COVID-19 Dataset, which included surveys assessing dispositional empathy and memory for the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases during the first wave of the pandemic. Empathy was not associated with memory accuracy for the confirmed cases when using an empathy measure that combined both cognitive and affective empathy. However, when using a measure that separately assessed cognitive and affective empathy, only affective empathy, specifically the personal distress subscale, was associated with greater memory accuracy. There was no age-related difference in memory accuracy despite age-related decreases in affective empathy. Results suggest that individuals with greater affective empathy (i.e., greater tendency to feel discomfort by the suffering of others) can have more accurate memory for details of an ongoing empathy-evoking situation. Findings are discussed in the context of motivation and emotional arousal. The current study provides ecological evidence to corroborate the interplay of empathy and memory.

Changes in Sleep Regularity and Perceived Life Stress across the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Analysis of a Predominately Female United States Convenience Sample

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had a profound impact on sleep and psychological well-being for individuals worldwide. This pre-registered investigation extends our prior study by tracking self-reported social jetlag (SJL), social sleep restriction (SSR), and perceived life stress from May 2020 through October 2021. Using web-based surveys, we collected self-reported sleep information with the Ultrashort Munich Chronotype Questionnaire at three additional timepoints (September 2020, February 2021 and October 2021). Further, we measured perceived life stress with the Perceived Stress Scale at two additional timepoints (February 2021 and October 2021). In a subsample of 181, predominantly female (87%), United States adults aged 19-89 years, we expanded our prior findings by showing that the precipitous drop in SJL during the pandemic first wave (May 2020), compared to pre-pandemic (February, 2020), rapidly rose with loosening social restrictions (September 2020), though never returned to pre-pandemic levels. This effect was greatest in young adults, but not associated with self-reported chronotype. Further, perceived life stress decreased across the pandemic, but was unrelated to SJL or SSR. These findings suggest that sleep schedules were sensitive to pandemic-related changes in social restrictions, especially in younger participants. We posit several possible mechanisms supporting these findings.

How the 2020 US Presidential election impacted sleep and its relationship to public mood and alcohol consumption

OBJECTIVES

Major sociopolitical events can influence the general public's affective state and other affect-related processes, such as sleep. Here, we investigated the extent that the 2020 US presidential election impacted sleep, public mood, and alcohol consumption. We also explored the relationship between affect and sleep changes during the peak period of election stress.

PARTICIPANTS

US-residing (n = 437) and non-US-residing (n = 106) participants were recruited online for participation in the study.

METHODS

A non-representative, convenience sample responded to daily assessments of their affect, sleep, and alcohol consumption during a baseline period (October 1-13, 2020) and in the days surrounding the 2020 US Election (October 30-November 12, 2020).

RESULTS

Analyses determined changes within and between US and non-US participants. Election Day evoked significantly reduced sleep amount and efficiency, coupled with heightened stress, negative affect, and increased alcohol use. While US participants were significantly more impacted in a number of domains, non-US participants also reported reduced sleep and greater stress compared to baseline. Across participants, disrupted sleep on Election Night correlated with changes in emotional well-being and alcohol consumption on Election Day.

CONCLUSION

These results suggest that major sociopolitical events can have global impacts on sleep that may interact with significant fluctuations in public mood and well-being. Further, while the largest impact is on the local population, these results suggest that the effects can extend beyond borders. These findings highlight the potential impact of future sociopolitical events on public well-being.

With age comes well-being: older age associated with lower stress, negative affect, and depression throughout the COVID-19 pandemic

Objectives: Despite initial concerns about older adult's emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, reports from the first months of the pandemic suggested that older adults were faring better than younger adults, reporting lower stress, negative affect, depression, and anxiety. In this study, we examined whether this pattern would persist as the pandemic progressed.Method: A convenience sample of 1,171 community-dwelling adults in the United States, ages 18-90, filled out surveys on various metrics of emotional well-being starting in March 2020 and at various time points through April 2021. We created time bins to account for the occurrence of significant national events, allowing us to determine how age would relate to affective outcomes when additional national-level emotional events were overlaid upon the stress of the pandemic.Results: Older age was associated with lower stress, negative affect, and depressive symptomatology, and with higher positive affect, and this effect was consistent across time points measured from March, 2020 through April, 2021. Age was less associated with measures of worry and social isolation, but older adults were more worried about their personal health throughout the pandemic.Conclusion: These results are consistent with literature suggesting that older age is associated with increased resilience in the face of stressful life experiences and show that this pattern may extend to resilience in the face of a prolonged real-world stressor.Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2021.2010183 .

Moral decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic: Associations with age, negative affect, and negative memory

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to determine whether age-related differences in utilitarian moral decision-making during sacrificial moral dilemmas extend to non-sacrificial dilemmas in real-world settings. As affect and emotional memory are associated with moral and prosocial behaviors, we also sought to understand how these were associated with moral behaviors during the 2020 spring phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Older age, higher negative affect, and greater reports of reflecting on negative aspects of the pandemic were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find goods, while older age and higher negative affect alone were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find medical supplies. Older age was associated with what appeared at first to be non-utilitarian moral behaviors with regard to the purchasing of these supplies; However, they also reported distributing these goods to family members rather than engaging in hoarding behaviors. These findings suggest that advancing age may be associated with engagement in utilitarian moral decision-making in real-world settings more than the sacrificial moral decision-making literature would suggest.

Relationships between Individual and Social Resources, Anxiety and Depression in the Early Lockdown Stage by the COVID-19 in Chile

The coronavirus disease has exposed the population to psychosocial threats that could increase mental health problems. This research analyzed the relationships between emotional states (negative [−EWB] and positive [+EWB] experienced well-being), personal resources (resilient coping [RC]), dispositional resources (control beliefs about stress [BAS]), and social resources (social support [SS]), and anxiety and depressive symptoms in a sample of the Chilean population (n = 592), who answered an online questionnaire. Multiple and moderated multiple regression analyses were carried out. Depressive symptoms showed a positive relationship with −EWB (β = 0.805; p < 0.001) and negative relationship with +EWB (β = −0.312; p < 0.001), RC (β = −0.089; p < 0.01), BAS (β = −0.183; p < 0.001) and SS (β = −0.082; p < 0.001). Anxiety symptoms showed a positive relationship with −EWB (β = 0.568; p < 0.001), and a negative relationship with +EWB (β = −0.101; p < 0.03) and BAS (β = −0.092; p < 0.001). BAS moderated the relationship between experienced well-being and depression symptoms, and RC moderated the relationship between experienced well-being with both depression and anxiety symptoms. Findings confirm the buffering effect of personal and dispositional resources when facing a sanitary and social crisis. Moreover, they help to understand the role of internal psychological processes during a crisis and how to cope with life-threatening events.

The long-tail effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on Italians' quality of life, sleep and physical activity

From March 2020 to May 2021, several lockdown periods caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have limited people’s usual activities and mobility in Italy, as well as around the world. These unprecedented confinement measures dramatically modified citizens’ daily lifestyles and behaviours. However, with the advent of summer 2021 and thanks to the vaccination campaign that significantly prevents serious illness and death, and reduces the risk of contagion, all the Italian regions finally returned to regular behaviours and routines. Anyhow, it is unclear if there is a long-tail effect on people’s quality of life, sleep- and physical activity-related behaviours. Thanks to the dataset described in this paper, it will be possible to obtain accurate insights of the changes induced by the lockdown period in the Italians’ health that will permit to provide practical suggestions at local, regional, and state institutions and companies to improve infrastructures and services that could be beneficial to Italians’ well being.

Measurement(s)	Quality of Life • Overall Sleep Quality Rating • Physical Activity Measurement
Technology Type(s)	SF-36 • Overall Sleep Quality Rating • International Physical Activity Questionnaire (August 2002) Short Last 7 Days Self-Administered Format
Sample Characteristic - Organism	Homo sapiens
Sample Characteristic - Environment	questionnaire

Sleep Quality, Insomnia, Anxiety, Fatigue, Stress, Memory and Active Coping during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: The current study aimed to evaluate the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on sleep quality, insomnia, anxiety, stress, fatigue and active coping in the United States. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using a publicly available database taken from the Boston College COVID-19 Sleep and Well-Being Dataset. We have selected the most recent data that included information about sleep quality and other measures, including insomnia, anxiety, stress, fatigue and coping, collected between 22 February−8 March 2021. Results: A total of 476 subjects were included in the analysis. The mean (SD) age of the study population was 38.8 (17.8) years, and there were more females (85%) than males. The population had a mean (SD) score of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) of 6 (3.2), with 65% having the prevalence of poor sleep quality (defined as PSQ ≥ 5; n = 311). The mean (SD) score for Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) was 6.9 (5.2), with 55 subjects (11.5%) having clinical insomnia (defined as ISI ≥ 15); of whom 9% had severe clinical insomnia. There were positive correlations between PSQI and ISI (r = 0.76, p < 0.001), PROMIS fatigue scale (r = 0.53, p < 0.001), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) (r = 0.46, p < 0.001), and Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) (r = 0.44, p < 0.001). The PSQI was inversely correlated with the John Henryism Active Coping Scale (JHACS) and memory scale. In the multivariate regression model, JHACS, ISI, fatigue, PSS and GAD-7 were significant predictors of PSQI, and these variables accounted for 62% of the variance of PSQI, adjusted for age and gender. Conclusion: An important contribution to the literature is made by this research, which demonstrates the significant prevalence of poor sleep quality and its association with insomnia and other mental and physical well-being. It also underlines the need to prioritise policy and public health efforts to address sleep issues that have substantial health and economic effects for both individuals and the population at large.

Age and chronotype influenced sleep timing changes during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

Social restrictions necessary to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) profoundly changed how we socialised, worked and, for students, attended classes. Interestingly, significant sleep pattern shifts occurred in the context of pandemic-related social restrictions. Whether age and chronotype influenced these sleep pattern changes remains poorly understood. In this pre-registered (https://osf.io/4a3fx), web-based study, United States residents reported, in one-time assessments, demographic information, self-reported chronotype using the reduced Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire, and pre-pandemic and pandemic first wave sleep timing using the Ultrashort Munich Chronotype Questionnaire. Participants reported sleep phase delays, reduced social jetlag (SJL) and reduced social sleep restriction (SSR) during the first wave of the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic. Pandemic-related changes in SJL and SSR varied with participants' age and self-reported chronotype. Young adults reported the greatest reductions in SJL and young adults and individuals with evening chronotypes reported the greatest reductions in SSR. We conclude that these groups may have been the most vulnerable to social-biological sleep timing desynchrony under pre-pandemic social, occupational, and educational schedules.

Sleep profiles as a longitudinal predictor for depression magnitude and variability following the onset of COVID-19

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has disrupted multiple domains of life including sleep. The present study used a longitudinal dataset (N = 671) and a person-centered analytic approach - latent profile analysis (LPA) - to elucidate the relationship between sleep and depression. We used LPA to identify profiles of sleep patterns assessed by Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) at the beginning of the study. The profiles were then used as a predictor of depression magnitude and variability over time. Three latent profiles were identified (medicated insomnia sleepers [MIS], inefficient sleepers [IS], and healthy sleepers [HS]). MIS exhibited the highest level of depression magnitude over time, followed by IS, followed by HS. A slightly different pattern emerged for the variability of depression: While MIS demonstrated significantly greater depression variability than both IS and HS, IS and HS did not differ in their variability of depression over time. Medicated insomnia sleepers exhibited both the greatest depression magnitude and variability than inefficient sleepers and healthy sleepers, while the latter two showed no difference in depression variability despite inefficient sleepers' greater depression magnitude than healthy sleepers. Clinical implications and limitations are discussed.

Aging, Empathy, and Prosocial Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objectives

Previous literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age–prosociality relationship occur during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, or might the pandemic—as a stressor that may differently influence young and older adults—create a boundary condition on the relationship? If so, can empathy, a well-known prosocial disposition, explain the age–prosociality relationship? This study investigated these questions and whether the target (distant others compared to close others) of prosocial behaviors differs by age.

Methods

Participants completed a series of surveys on dispositional empathy and prosocial behaviors for a study assessing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 330 participants (aged 18–89) from the United States who completed all of the surveys included in the present analyses.

Results

Age was positively related to greater prosociality during the pandemic. Although empathy was positively associated with individuals’ prosociality, it did not account for the age–prosociality association. Interestingly, increasing age was associated with greater prosocial behaviors toward close others (i.e., family, friends).

Discussion

Results are discussed in the context of socioemotional goals and substantiate that findings of age differences in prosocial behaviors occur during the period of limited resources and threat associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.