Creating community and building connection through play: An improvisational response to the coronavirus pandemic

Responding to the call for 'social distancing' people around the world engaged in play together via the internet. While these activities could be seen as a diversion, they can also be understood as, along with wearing masks , essential to people surviving the pandemic. This qualitative study explores the experiences of people who participated in Creating Connection and Building Community Through Play, a series of five synchronous improvisational play sessions on Zoom. The sessions averaged 83 people with a total of 287 individuals from 29 countries participating in one or more sessions. Analysis revealed that virtual activities focused on relationality, improvisation and play provided people with connection and community in the midst of isolation, and that co-creating these experiences was emotionally healing for many. The findings advance our understanding of the importance of adult play for building and maintaining emotional health, creating community, and responding to ongoing challenges. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Face masks have a limited influence on first impressions: evidence from three experiments.

Considering the widespread use of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, the goal of the current study was to examine how occlusion of the lower half of the face may impact first impression formation. We conducted three experiments, each building on previous research, investigating the effect of face masks on first impressions of faces across the lifespan (children, young and older adults). Experiment 1 examined whether the mandatory influence of happy facial expressions on perceived trustworthiness in young adult faces is influenced by face masks. Experiment 2 examined behavioural consequences of adults' first impressions of child faces to determine whether masks reduce the effect of facial niceness on interpretations of ambiguous behaviour. Experiment 3 investigated consensus for first impressions of trustworthiness and competence in older adult faces with and without masks, as well as consensus on underlying facial cues. The results of all three experiments present converging evidence that masks do not have a significant impact on first impressions and their behavioural consequences.

Resilience during Crisis and the Role of Age: Involuntary Telework during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

We investigated the relationship between age, resilience, job demands and resources, and self-regulation in 1715 university employees during the COVID-19 pandemic (February 2021) by means of an online survey with closed and open questions. Correlation, regression, and qualitative analyses showed that older employees reported higher resilience than younger employees. This finding was robust after controlling for background factors (i.e., gender, expat status, job type, living alone). Age and resilience were directly related to higher job resources (i.e., job security and equipment), work-life balance, and seeing positives, whereas the relationship to demands was ambiguous. Age was unrelated to workload, negatively related to childcare, and positively to eldercare. Resilience was negatively related to workload but unrelated to childcare or eldercare demands. When all variables were combined to jointly predict resilience, age, job resources, and self-regulation resources predicted resilience, whereas demands (i.e., workload, childcare, and eldercare demands) did not. Our findings suggest that age-related advantages in well-being have persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Older workers were more likely to reframe the crisis and see it as an opportunity for personal growth. They possess and utilize resources in unique and beneficial ways, which could also benefit younger workers.

Chinese Color Nest Project : An accelerated longitudinal brain-mind cohort.

The ongoing Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP) was established to create normative charts for brain structure and function across the human lifespan, and link age-related changes in brain imaging measures to psychological assessments of behavior, cognition, and emotion using an accelerated longitudinal design. In the initial stage, CCNP aims to recruit 1520 healthy individuals (6-90 years), which comprises three phases: developing (devCCNP: 6-18 years, N = 480), maturing (matCCNP: 20-60 years, N = 560) and aging (ageCCNP: 60-84 years, N = 480). In this paper, we present an overview of the devCCNP, including study design, participants, data collection and preliminary findings. The devCCNP has acquired data with three repeated measurements from 2013 to 2017 in Southwest University, Chongqing, China (CCNP-SWU, N = 201). It has been accumulating baseline data since July 2018 and the second wave data since September 2020 in Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China (CCNP-CAS, N = 168). Each participant in devCCNP was followed up for 2.5 years at 1.25-year intervals. The devCCNP obtained longitudinal neuroimaging, biophysical, social, behavioral and cognitive data via MRI, parent- and self-reported questionnaires, behavioral assessments, and computer tasks. Additionally, data were collected on children's learning, daily life and emotional states during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. We address data harmonization across the two sites and demonstrated its promise of characterizing the growth curves for the overall brain morphometry using multi-center longitudinal data. CCNP data will be shared via the National Science Data Bank and requests for further information on collaboration and data sharing are encouraged.