The relationship between change in routine and student mental wellbeing during a nationwide lockdown.

OBJECTIVE: During March 2020, the UK entered a national lockdown, causing a sudden change in undergraduate students' routines. This study uses this event to investigate the impact routine change had on students' mental wellbeing; in particular looking at depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and eating behaviors. METHOD: Participants reported their daily routine timings (waking, breakfast, lunch, evening meal and bedtime) and activities (e.g. exercise amount, time with friends, time studying, etc) on a typical Monday, Wednesday and Saturday during term time and lockdown. Additionally they completed the PROMIS measures of anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbance, and the Eating Pathology Symptom Inventory. RESULTS: Lockdown saw small but significant shifts in routine timing (on average 1.5 h) However, there was no clear overall pattern of relationships between mental wellbeing and routine structure or magnitude of routine change. There was some evidence of changes in amount of exercise relating to reported anxiety. DISCUSSION: These findings are consistent with the current literature reporting lockdown effects on behavior. Routine timings shifted, but this change was small and largely did not affect the mental wellbeing reported by undergraduate students. The change in amount of exercise posed by lockdown did appear to be an important factor in wellbeing, and more research should focus on the wellbeing implications of closing places for exercise.

Do individual differences in face recognition ability moderate the other ethnicity effect?

Individuals are better at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group compared with other ethnicity faces-the other-ethnicity effect (OEE). This finding is said to reflect differences in experience and familiarity to faces from other ethnicities relative to faces corresponding with the viewers' ethnicity. However, own-ethnicity face recognition performance ranges considerably within a population, from very poor to extremely good. In addition, within-population recognition performance on other-ethnicity faces can also vary considerably with some individuals being classed as "other ethnicity face blind" (Wan et al., 2017). Despite evidence for considerable variation in performance within population for faces of both types, it is currently unclear whether the magnitude of the OEE changes as a function of this variability. By recruiting large-scale multinational samples, we investigated the size of the OEE across the full range of own and other ethnicity face performance while considering measures of social contact. We find that the magnitude of the OEE is remarkably consistent across all levels of within-population own- and other-ethnicity face recognition ability, and this pattern was unaffected by social contact measures. These findings suggest that the OEE is a persistent feature of face recognition performance, with consequences for models built around very poor, and very good face recognizers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).