Relating Psychiatric Symptoms and Self-Regulation During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Post by Andrew Vo
The takeaway
Stressors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can significantly affect our mental health and cognitive abilities. Individual differences in self-regulation and psychiatric symptoms can make us more vulnerable to the negative impacts of the pandemic.
What's the science?
Self-regulation is a broad construct, comprised of functions like cognitive control and impulsivity, that allows us to behave flexibly and achieve our goals. Impairment in self-regulation has been linked to several psychiatric disorders (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder). Additionally, environmental stressors may also impair self-regulation. One recent stressor that affected us all is the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw increased stress and anxiety by fear of infection as well as social isolation from containment measures, among other factors. Although the pandemic has had clear negative consequences on our mental health, its specific impact on cognitive function remains unclear. This week in Translational Psychiatry, Vaghi et al. investigated how the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the relationship between different dimensions of psychiatric symptoms and changes in self-regulation.
How did they do it?
The authors relied on an already existing dataset in which, before the pandemic (i.e., 2016), participants were administered a battery of 37 cognitive tasks and 22 self-reported surveys that each examined different facets of self-regulation. In this study, a subset of these individuals were contacted again, to complete the same battery, immediately after the onset of the pandemic (i.e., 2020). After the pandemic onset, these subjects also reported their psychiatric symptoms, well-being, and subjective experience of the pandemic. The authors applied a data-reduction analysis to each set of self-regulation measures and psychiatric questionnaires that distilled the different tasks/surveys and psychopathologies into underlying core factors. Then, they studied how individual differences in psychiatric factors affected longitudinal changes in self-regulation pre- and post-pandemic onset.
What did they find?
The authors found that individual differences in transdiagnostic psychiatric symptoms were related to longitudinal changes in self-regulation measures (task- and survey-based) following pandemic onset. For example, they observed that, compared to the period preceding the onset of the pandemic, individuals with high levels of depression/anxiety had more cautious behavior as they needed to accumulate more evidence before making a decision. Those who scored high on a social-withdrawal psychiatric factor demonstrated decreases in the perception-response self-regulation factor.
Though a similar longitudinal effect was not observed when considering survey-based factors, such factors did correlate with concurrent psychiatric scores. Specifically, poor emotional control self-regulation factor was related to several psychiatric factors, including Anxious-Depression, Compulsivity, and Social-Withdrawal. Psychiatric factors were also related to subjective effects of the pandemic, as individuals with higher psychiatric scores reported a greater negative impact of the pandemic.
Finally, the authors tested whether task- or survey-based measures of self-regulation could predict psychiatric symptoms related to the pandemic. They correlated self-regulation factors derived from data collected before (i.e., prospective) or after (i.e., concurrent) pandemic onset with psychiatric factors that were available only after pandemic onset. Whereas survey-based measures could make both prospective and concurrent predictions successfully, task-based measures could not.
What's the impact?
This study showed how individual differences in self-regulation and psychiatric symptoms shape cognitive vulnerabilities to stressors such as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors did so by using a comprehensive battery of measures rather than the traditional approach generally limited to a single task or questionnaire. Notably, they examined the effects of a real-life stressor on cognitive function providing greater ecological validity compared to artificial laboratory stressors.