Frontiers in psychology
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
The Psychological Impacts of COVID-19 Home Confinement and Physical Activity: A Structural Equation Model Analysis.
COVID-19 break out has created panic and fear in society. A strict kind of lockdown was imposed in Wuhan, Hubei province of China. During home confinement due to lockdown, people face multidimensional issues. The present study explored the psychological impacts of COVID-19 home confinement during the lockdown period and Wuhan's residents' attitude toward physical activity. ⋯ COVID-19 home confinement created various psychological impacts, negatively affecting the emotional state due to depression and anxiety. Physical activity is the best strategy to manage human nature's psychological issues, and people's attitudes were positive toward physical activity during home confinement. However, the lockdown policy also affects physical activity participation negatively, and a sedentary lifestyle prevailed during home confinement.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
Psychological, Behavioral, and Interpersonal Effects and Clinical Implications for Health Systems of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: A Call for Research.
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) emerged at the end of 2019 and was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. Both the COVID-19 emergency and the extraordinary measures to contain it have negatively affected the life of billions of people and have threatened individuals and nations. One of the main goals of clinical and health psychology during this pandemic is to investigate the behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and psychobiological responses to the COVID-19 emergency as well as to the preventive measures that have been imposed by governments to limit the contagion, such as social isolation. ⋯ In addition, we call for studies that assess the specific effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on highly vulnerable populations such as children, adolescents, pregnant women, patients suffering from chronic and life-threatening conditions, healthcare workers, and elderly citizens. Papers focusing on the impact of emotion regulation and coping strategies are encouraged. Original research, data reports, study protocols, single case reports and community case studies, theoretical perspectives, and viewpoints are invited to help improve our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
Investigating the Psychology of Financial Markets During COVID-19 Era: A Case Study of the US and European Markets.
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has imperatively shaken the behavior of the global financial markets. This study estimated the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of the financial markets of Europe and the US. The results revealed that the returns of the S&P 500 index have been greatly affected by a lockdown in the US owing to COVID-19. ⋯ The UK stock markets witnessed that in the short-run, deficiency of health management systems imperatively damaged the stock returns of the London Stock Exchange. The investigation revealed that deficiency of health systems and lockdown conditions have imperatively damaged the structure of financial markets, inferring that sustainable development of these nations is at risk due to COVID-19. The study suggested that governments should allocate more of their budget to the health sector to overcome a health crisis in the future.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
The Effect of COVID-19 on Loneliness in the Elderly. An Empirical Comparison of Pre-and Peri-Pandemic Loneliness in Community-Dwelling Elderly.
Old-age loneliness is a global problem with many members of the scientific community suspecting increased loneliness in the elderly population during COVID-19 and the associated safety measures. Although hypothesized, a direct comparison of loneliness before and during the pandemic is hard to achieve without a survey of loneliness prior to the pandemic. This study provides a direct comparison of reported loneliness before and during the pandemic using 1:1 propensity score matching (PSM) on a pre- and a peri-pandemic sample of elderly (60+ years) individuals from Lower Austria, a county of Austria (Europe). ⋯ Although the reported loneliness remained rather low, this result illustrated the effect of the "new normal" under COVID-19. As loneliness is a risk factor for physical and mental illness, this result is important in planning the future handling of the pandemic, as safety measures seem to have a negative impact on loneliness. This work confirms the anticipated increase in loneliness in the elderly population during COVID-19.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2020
Interactive Alignment and Lexical Triggering of Code-Switching in Bilingual Dialogue.
When bilingual speakers use two languages in the same utterance, this is called code-switching. Previous research indicates that bilinguals' likelihood to code-switch is enhanced when the utterance to be produced (1) contains a word with a similar form across languages (lexical triggering) and (2) is preceded by a code-switched utterance, for example from a dialogue partner (interactive alignment/priming of code-switching). Both factors have mostly been tested on corpus data and have not yet been studied in combination. ⋯ Rather than aligning on their dialogue partner's pragmatic act of code-switching, bilinguals aligned on the language activation from the utterance produced by their dialogue partner. All in all, the results show how co-activation of languages at multiple levels of processing together influence bilinguals' tendency to code-switch. The findings call for a perspective on bilingual language production in which cross-speaker and cross-language processes are combined.