Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic Nationwide Lockdown on Mental Health, Environmental Concern, and Prejudice Against Other Social Groups

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit humanity globally. Besides its obvious threats to our physical health and economic stability, one can only speculate about the pandemic?s and its countermeasures? psychosocial impacts. Here, we took advantage of a sample of healthy male participants who had completed psychosocial measures on mental health, environmental concern, and prejudice against asylum-seekers just before and during the nationwide lockdown in Germany in spring 2020. A follow-up assessment of 140 participants during the lockdown provided a unique opportunity to track psychosocial changes in a prospective longitudinal study design. In comparison to before the lockdown (1) mental health worsened, (2) environmental concern increased, and (3) prejudice against asylum-seekers decreased. Our study demonstrates psychosocial ?side effects? of the pandemic that bring both challenges and opportunities for our society with regard to the handling of psychological reactions to this pandemic and further global crises, including climate change and mass migration.

Temporal dynamics of resting EEG networks are associated with prosociality.

As prosociality is key to facing many of our societies' global challenges (such as fighting a global pandemic), we need to better understand why some individuals are more prosocial than others. The present study takes a neural trait approach, examining whether the temporal dynamics of resting EEG networks are associated with inter-individual differences in prosociality. In two experimental sessions, we collected 55 healthy males' resting EEG, their self-reported prosocial concern and values, and their incentivized prosocial behavior across different reward domains (money, time) and social contexts (collective, individual). By means of EEG microstate analysis we identified the temporal coverage of four canonical resting networks (microstates A, B, C, and D) and their mutual communication in order to examine their association with an aggregated index of prosociality. Participants with a higher coverage of microstate A and more transitions from microstate C to A were more prosocial. Our study demonstrates that temporal dynamics of intrinsic brain networks can be linked to complex social behavior. On the basis of previous findings on links of microstate A with sensory processing, our findings suggest that participants with a tendency to engage in bottom-up processing during rest behave more prosocially than others.