ABSTRACT
Introduction: The first lockdown response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been an unexpected public health stress, notably in Europe. Its putative effect on mental health in young people was rapidly emphasized, but thorough evaluation of its impact on emotional components are scarce. Therefore we investigated the emotion regulation in a sample of young europeans during the peri-lockdown period. Aim(s): i) to specify some emotional components assessed by a self-questionnaire in young adults and ii) to investigate the subjective perception of their degradation with the change in their social environment 3 months before and during the first lockdown period. Methods: a modified version of the Coronavirus Health Impact Survey (v.0.2;, was completed online by 447 22-23 years-old participants, part of the IMAGEN cohort (https://imagen-europe.com) in Paris, London, Nottingham, Berlin, and Mannheim areas. It assessed participants’ self-perception in life changes caused by the coronavirus crisis. Participants retrospectively rated their own levels of emotions and worries in the 3 months before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in the participants’ local area (pre–COVID-19 symptoms), as well as in the past 2 weeks (peri–COVID-19 symptoms) with a Cronbach's alpha =.81 and.87 for the past 3 months and past 2 weeks, respectively. participants indicated their levels of 1) worry, 2) happiness versus sadness, 3) enjoyment in usual activities, 4) feeling relaxed versus anxious, 5) feeling fidgety or restless, 6) feeling fatigued or tired, 7) concentration, 8) irritability or anger, 9) loneliness, 10) experiences of negative thoughts and 11) suicide thoughts/self-harm. An exploratory factor analysis with Varimax rotation and using maximum likelihood method of estimation was performed on scored data. Thereafter, effects on mental health variables were searched with ANOVAs. Results: The factor analysis revealed three factors within the emotion/worries section of the questionnaire: valence, psychomotor, and attention. To investigate the effect of the lockdown on emotional health, a score for every participant has been determined in relation with each factor. Then, the difference between the value of factor score for each participant at three months before and during the last two weeks of the first lockdown was further used in the analyses. ANOVAs showed that the item markedly related to emotional deterioration was social distance, which had a deleterious effect on emotional valence (p=2.09e-06), psychomotricity (p=0.0167), and attention (p=8.99e-05) factor scores. The participants who had a poor emotional health as denoted by their valence scores and suicidal thoughts before the lockdown were in majority better during the lockdown, whereas the reverse was detected in those with initial low scores in those measures. In contrast, the socio-professional category, drug addiction diagnosis, closure of university/business building and financial problems had no statistical impact on the emotional state of this sample of young europeans during the first lockdown. Conclusion: The present participants’ self-evaluations further support that the social distancing was the major item related to emotional health deterioration during the first COVID-19 lockdown. No conflict of interest