The COVID-19 pandemic has been widely divisive -- but could that divisiveness reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine? A study published in Brain Behavior and Immunity suggests that a lack of social cohesion decreases the antibody response to the coronavirus...
A study published in the journal Anthrozoös suggests that pet ownership is tied to improved well-being during the pandemic, but only among people with low resilience. For people with high levels of resilience, owning a pet was actually linked to lower...
Nudging is a means of indirectly influencing human behaviour by changing the choice architecture made available to the decision maker. A recent study published in Nature examined the efficacy of sending short messages (i.e., nudges) to individuals who did not...
New research conducted at Kent State University investigated the role political affiliation may play in stigmatizing those with COVID-19. The findings indicate that those identifying as Democrats and Independents were more likely to stigmatize those with COVID-19 due to greater...
New psychology research indicates that religion provided little protection against racism-induced mental health issues among Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings have been published in the Journal of Religion and Health.
Published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers found that people who wear masks tend to be viewed as more socially distant. The findings provide evidence of an implicit association between the concepts of masked faces and psychological distance.
The fact that many people hold conspiracy theory beliefs was brought into the spotlight during the COVID-19 pandemic, which raises the question: what makes people vulnerable to misinformation? A study published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that trusting science is...
Scientists are working to understand how exactly a COVID infection affects the human brain. But this is difficult to study, because we can’t experiment on living people’s brains. One way around this is to create organoids, which are miniature organs...
A study compared magnetic resonance images of brains of 35 undergraduate students and found that imaging results were the same regardless of whether the students wore a face mask during the imaging processes or not. The study was published in...
People who have or have had COVID-19 tend to report more complaints about their cognitive abilities, according to new research published in Psychiatry Research. But these complaints do not appear to reflect actual deficits in cognitive performance.
A new study, published in PLOS ONE, suggests the COVID pandemic has indeed triggered much greater shifts in personality than we would expect to have seen naturally over this period. In particular, the researchers found that people were less extroverted,...
Researchers found that COVID-19 cases that resulted in hospitalization were associated with an 11% increase in risk for developing schizophrenia.
A new online survey found that men who suffered a loss of social status due to the COVID-19 pandemic were over four times more likely to have attempted suicide in the past month, more than twice as likely to report...
New research helps to explain the association between political conservatism and riskier pandemic lifestyles. According to new research published in Discover Social Science and Health, political conservatives tend to be less empathetic, hold more authoritarian beliefs, and feel less threatened...
New research published in Behavioral Sciences provides evidence that information and communications technologies helped to protect students' sense of community amid the COVID-19 pandemic.