ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has elicited increases in stress, anxiety and depression, as evidenced in large samples of adults (Ettman et al., 2020;Jia et al., 2020). In youth, mental health symptoms also appear elevated compared to pre-pandemic norms (Glynn et al., 2021, Hawke et al., 2020). While children's mental health symptoms appear to be increasing during the pandemic, many studies implement cross-sectional, rather than longitudinal designs. Therefore, less is known about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth's stress and within-person changes over time. In addition, studying stress biomarkers such as hair cortisol can inform about the impact that the current pandemic and resulting changes to daily life have on youth's stress physiology. To our knowledge, only one previous study examined hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) in children during the pandemic, and found that more negative changes to family life predicted greater HCC in 4-5-year-old children relative to pre-pandemic HCC (Hastings et al., 2021). The present study utilized hair cortisol data collected pre-pandemic (2017-2020) and re-contacted participants to participate in a follow-up study during the pandemic (October 2020 - March 2021). Participants (N = 86, 61.7% female) included youth ages 10-13 (M = 11.41, SD = .95) who had provided hair samples in the original study and agreed to provide a second hair sample during the pandemic. Parents collected hair samples from youth while guided by experimenters via Zoom and mailed the samples to our laboratory. Parents and youth also completed questionnaires regarding the impact of the pandemic on their lives, including the Covid-19 Adolescent Symptom & Psychological Experience Questionnaire. The Child Life Events and Perceived Stress Scales were administered both before and during the pandemic. Initial paired samples t-tests revealed a significant increase in hair cortisol from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic, t(79) = 3.305, p = .001, and increases in youth self-reported perceived stress, t(84) = 7.15, p < .0001. Conference analyses will include comparing post-pandemic HCC in this sample to another age-matched pre-pandemic comparison group to account for any age-related differences. The present study illustrates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's long-term cortisol output using a within-person design.