How Has COVID-19 Impacted Our Language Use?

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to severe consequences for people's mental health. The pandemic has also influenced our language use, shaping our word formation habits. The overuse of new metaphorical meanings has received particular attention from the media. Here, we wanted to investigate whether these metaphors have led to the formation of new semantic associations in memory. A sample of 120 university students was asked to decide whether a target word was or was not related to a prime stimulus. Responses for pandemic pairs in which the target referred to the newly acquired metaphorical meaning of the prime (i.e., "trench"-"hospital") were compared to pre-existing semantically related pairs (i.e., "trench"-"soldier") and neutral pairs (i.e., "trench"-"response"). Results revealed greater accuracy and faster response times for pandemic pairs than for semantic pairs and for semantic pairs compared to neutral ones. These findings suggest that the newly learned pandemic associations have created stronger semantic links in our memory compared to the pre-existing ones. Thus, this work confirms the adaptive nature of human language, and it underlines how the overuse of metaphors evoking dramatic images has been, in part, responsible for many psychological disorders still reported among people nowadays.

A Standardized Prospective Memory Evaluation of the Effects of COVID-19 Confinement on Young Students.

The restriction imposed worldwide for limiting the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) globally impacted our lives, decreasing people's wellbeing, causing increased anxiety, depression, and stress and affecting cognitive functions, such as memory. Recent studies reported decreased working memory (WM) and prospective memory (PM), which are pivotal for the ability to plan and perform future activities. Although the number of studies documenting the COVID-19 effects has recently blossomed, most of them employed self-reported questionnaires as the assessment method. The main aim of our study was to use standardized tests to evaluate WM and PM in a population of young students. A sample of 150 female psychology students was recruited online for the administration of two self-reported questionnaires that investigated psychological wellbeing (DASS-21), prospective, and retrospective memory (PRMQ). Subjects were also administered two standardized tests for WM (PASAT) and PM (MIST). We found increased anxiety, depression, and stress and decreased PM as measured by self-reports. The perceived memory failures agreed with the results from the standardized tests, which demonstrated a decrease in both WM and PM. Thus, COVID-19 restriction has strongly impacted on students' mental health and memory abilities, leaving an urgent need for psychological and cognitive recovery plans.