ELEVATED HAIR CORTISOL CONCENTRATIONS IN YOUTH DURING THE PANDEMIC

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.

The Effect of Wearing a Face Mask on Face Image Quality

Due to the COVID-19 situation, face masks have become a main part of our daily life. Wearing mouth-and-nose protection has been made a mandate in many public places, to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. However, face masks affect the performance of face recognition, since a large area of the face is covered. The effect of wearing a face mask on the different components of the face recognition system in a collaborative environment is a problem that is still to be fully studied. This work studies, for the first time, the effect of wearing a face mask on face image quality by utilising state-of-the-art face image quality assessment methods of different natures. This aims at providing better understanding on the effect of face masks on the operation of face recognition as a whole system. In addition, we further studied the effect of simulated masks on face image utility in comparison to real face masks. We discuss the correlation between the mask effect on face image quality and that on the face verification performance by automatic systems and human experts, indicating a consistent trend between both factors. The evaluation is conducted on the database containing (1) no-masked faces, (2) real face masks, and (3) simulated face masks, by synthetically generating digital facial masks on no-masked faces. Finally, a visual interpretation of the face areas contributing to the quality score of a selected set of quality assessment methods is provided to give a deeper insight into the difference of network decisions in masked and non-masked faces, among other variations.

Research on the Design of Spatial Environment Health in Primary and Middle Schools in the Post-epidemic Era

In the context of the global pandemic of COVID-19, aiming at problems such as restricted teaching activities in primary and middle schools and the impact on the mental health of children and adolescents, through the analysis of the space environmental needs of primary and middle schools in the post-epidemic era, three design strategies are proposed for flexible space design, space information construction, and space security and comfort creation, provide ideas for the construction of primary and middle schools in the future. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.