Exploring the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on wellbeing across different styles of lockdown

Mental health hygiene during a health crisis: Exploring factors associated with media-induced secondary trauma in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic

Aims

Given the risk of developing vicarious trauma through news media has increased during the pandemic, we explored risk factors associated with media induced secondary trauma, and its behavioral and psychological implications.

Methods

An international study (N = 1066), with a diverse sample, was administered in July 2020. We used standardized and validated questionnaires to measure news consumption, media-related trauma, compliance, and paranoia.

Results

Greater frequency of news consumption, accessing news via social media and WHO, and believing in conspiracy theories increased likelihood of developing media-induced secondary trauma. News related trauma was associated with greater compliance with safety measures and increased paranoid ideation. Media-trauma however exhibited a greater association with paranoia than compliance.

Conclusion

Findings highlight the need to facilitate a collaborative intervention, with public, media houses, health safety officials, and social scientists to have a deeper understanding of potential psychological costs of news consumption patterns.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on physical activity, life satisfaction, anxiety, stress perception and coping strategies in student-athletes: A comparison between Belarus and Poland-countries with a different approach of anti-pandemic measures

Background

More than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed lives of people around the world and had a profound impact on the field of sports. This has resulted in decreased physical activity (PA) and changes in mental health. The goal was to assess self-reported physical activity, life satisfaction, perceived stress, choice of coping strategies and their correlations among student athletes from two neighboring countries facing different anti-pandemic strategies.

Methods

Cross-sectional surveys using standardized questionnaires: International Physical Activity Questionnaire-Short Form (IPAQ-SF), Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10), and Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced (Mini-COPE) to compare 600 students from Physical Education and Sports departments of universities in Belarus (n = 333), where restrictions were found to be less stringent than in neighboring Poland (n = 267).

Results

Minor differences in physical activities between both countries indicate that student athletes have adapted fairly quickly and found ways to keep their PA at a fairly high level. Nevertheless, higher PA was reported in the group of student athletes from Belarus. PA levels correlated with life satisfaction, anxiety and stress levels. Female students from Poland reported lower satisfaction with their lives. Their perception of stress was twice as high as that of their Belarusian counterparts. The most common coping strategy in both groups was active coping. Polish respondents less frequently used strategies of avoiding problems and seeking outside support.

Conclusion

The level of physical activity and well-being of student athletes are associated with increased mental health and coping with stress. They also contribute to prevention of affective disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, it is dependent on the country's anti-pandemic policies.

Remote auditory assessment using Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART) and participant-owned devices

Remote testing of auditory function can be transformative to both basic research and hearing healthcare; however, historically, many obstacles have limited remote collection of reliable and valid auditory psychometric data. Here, we report performance on a battery of auditory processing tests using a remotely administered system, Portable Automatic Rapid Testing. We compare a previously reported dataset collected in a laboratory setting with the same measures using uncalibrated, participant-owned devices in remote settings (experiment 1, n = 40) remote with and without calibrated hardware (experiment 2, n = 36) and laboratory with and without calibrated hardware (experiment 3, n = 58). Results were well-matched across datasets and had similar reliability, but overall performance was slightly worse than published norms. Analyses of potential nuisance factors such as environmental noise, distraction, or lack of calibration failed to provide reliable evidence that these factors contributed to the observed variance in performance. These data indicate feasibility of remote testing of suprathreshold auditory processing using participants' own devices. Although the current investigation was limited to young participants without hearing difficulties, its outcomes demonstrate the potential for large-scale, remote hearing testing of more hearing-diverse populations both to advance basic science and to establish the clinical viability of auditory remote testing.