COVID-Dynamic Study Aims

Project Aims

To provide data from a detailed longitudinal assessment of 1000 subjects during the COVID-19 pandemic. A major value of our study will be to make all of our data publicly available to other scientists as rapidly as possible (on the Open Science Framework ). Our assessment aims to be broad and includes information about demographics (income, job, age, and many others), about changes in work habits and social behavior in real life, about media usage and news impact, and about emotions.
To quantify explicit changes in mood and emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have an especially rich array of tasks and questionnaires that will assess emotion, including a range of clinically validated instruments. We will provide additional data about the news sources and events to which participants are exposed (both through our online questionnaire, and by scraping news sources).
To quantify changes in implicit emotional bias. As reviewed above, much of human behavior is influenced by implicit biases of which subjects may be unaware. We will use several established tasks to assess implicit affective biases to different groups of people (race, political party, profession). The longitudinal design of our study will permit an examination of how long it takes for emotional biases to shift, and how easily they can return to baseline.
To quantify changes in decision-making. The explicit and implicit emotional biases determine the preferences that guide choices. For instance, the evolving negative bias to close social distance, or to large groups of people, will influence choices not to participate in close group activities. Altruistic behaviors are altered, as are defensive behaviors. Once again, the longitudinal design of our study will provide invaluable insight into how malleable such decisions are. When the pandemic is over, will people continue social distancing and be averse to large groups?