| NSF Org: |
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 3, 2020 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | October 14, 2020 |
| Award Number: | 2049706 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Steven Breckler
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | July 9, 2020 |
| End Date: | March 31, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $50,682.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $50,682.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
550 S COLLEGE AVE NEWARK DE US 19713-1324 (302)831-2136 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
DE US 19716-0099 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Social Psychology, EPSCoR Co-Funding |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
The growing presence of COVID-19 in the United States creates a social psychological problem of a scale never before encountered in modern times. This time-critical research project investigates how peoples? feelings of uncertainty about the spread of COVID-19 across the United States impacts emotional and motivational behaviors to avoid the virus, even when people may be unaware of how they feel and act. Emotion-based responses are hypothesized to be amplified because of the uncertainty involved in a contagion spread. To test this hypothesis, the project develops a novel smart phone application that participants can use around the country, even when they are in physical isolation. The smart phone application creates a novel way to study the emotional impact of virus transmission as well as educate participants about their own motivations to stay healthy. This project informs and educates about the science of COVID-19 transmission and prevention to help develop interventions for this and future pandemics.
This time-critical RAPID project utilizes the smart phone application to engage in immediate nationwide testing of one thousand individuals from across the country. Testing will continue for nine months so that peak and declining rates of disease are captured. The smart phone application assesses non-conscious motivational tendencies to avoid objects and people which could potentially transmit COVID-19. The research also tests how these motivational tendencies promote or hinder health-related behaviors such as handwashing and social distancing. Importantly, the project investigates regional differences of infection rates across the United States to test the influence of increasing and declining infection rates on peoples? feelings and actions. The research and the software developed in this project will facilitate the development of future interventions aimed at reducing the emotional distress caused by the spread of deadly diseases and to increase healthy behaviors in response to them.
This project is jointly funded by the Social Psychology Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Emotional states influence our sense of how time passes. During the COVID-19, pandemic many people experienced alterations in how they sensed time passing. We examined emotions and the perception of time throughout the entire first year during the COVID-19 pandemic to determine whether emotional states (both positive and negative feelings) and the perception of time passing would interact to predict how often participants engaged in health behaviors suggested to slow the spread of the pandemic (e.g., social distancing, wearing a mask). The results of this year-long study revealed that positive emotional states (e.g., happiness) related to time passing more quickly. In contrast, negative emotional states (e.g., nervousness) related to time passing more slowly. The combination of negative emotional states (e.g., nervousness) and feeling that time was dragging was related to greater engagement in avoidance behaviors suggested to slow the spread of the pandemic (e.g., avoiding large gathering). Interestingly, we also found that the combination of positive emotional states (e.g., happiness) and feeling that time was flying was related to greater engagement in adopting behaviors suggested to slow the spread of the pandemic to others (e.g., mask wearing). Together, these findings help us understand why time may seemed to have passed differently during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this work suggests that both positive and negative emotional states and our sense of how time passes have important implications for public health initiatives aimed at increasing engagement in behaviors that may prevent the spread of pathogens.
As part of this project, a new smartphone app was developed to measure emotion, time passing, and implicit measures of motivation. The app worked very well to measure psychological reactions during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an important criterion for psychological measures is whether they have consistency in what they measure, called reliability. There have been criticisms raised about the reliability of implicit measures, including the task used in the smartphone app we developed. Some of this stems from a lack of replication in studies using these tasks and a lack of investigations that assess the reliability of the task over long periods of time. The smartphone-based task used in this study is relatively new, and its reliability has not been investigated. We examine the task’s reliability in a large and diverse sample of 1077 participants from across the United States. Participants were measured semi-monthly over one year. The smartphone-based task showed moderately-good reliability. Being able to assess reliability over an entire year showed that the task has good reliability. These results suggest that the smartphone app developed as a result of this project has good consistency in what it measures. Through testing of reliability of this smartphone-based task, this work suggests the task can used in future studies to assess implicit psychological processes when in-person assessments are not possible. The development and testing of this smartphone task can benefit future research collected during a pandemic, or when human interaction is not advised.
Last Modified: 05/02/2023
Modified by: Philip Gable
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