Mills-Finnerty Colleen, Staggs Halee, Hogoboom Nichole, Naparstek Sharon, Harvey Tiffany, Beaudreau Sherry A, O'Hara Ruth
Sierra Pacific Mental Illness, Research, Education, and Clinical Center, Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, United States.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States.
Front Psychiatry. 2023 Mar 29;14:995445. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.995445. eCollection 2023.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with increased rates of mental health problems, particularly in younger people.
We quantified mental health of online workers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cognition during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020. A pre-registered data analysis plan was completed, testing the following three hypotheses: reward-related behaviors will remain intact as age increases; cognitive performance will decline with age; mood symptoms will worsen during the pandemic compared to before. We also conducted exploratory analyses including Bayesian computational modeling of latent cognitive parameters.
Self-report depression (Patient Health Questionnaire 8) and anxiety (General Anxiety Disorder 7) prevalence were compared from two samples of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers ages 18-76: pre-COVID 2018 ( = 799) and peri-COVID 2020 ( = 233). The peri-COVID sample also completed a browser-based neurocognitive test battery.
We found support for two out of three pre-registered hypotheses. Notably our hypothesis that mental health symptoms would increase in the peri-COVID sample compared to pre-COVID sample was not supported: both groups reported high mental health burden, especially younger online workers. Higher mental health symptoms were associated with negative impacts on cognitive performance (speed/accuracy tradeoffs) in the peri-COVID sample. We found support for two hypotheses: reaction time slows down with age in two of three attention tasks tested, whereas reward function and accuracy appear to be preserved with age.
This study identified high mental health burden, particularly in younger online workers, and associated negative impacts on cognitive function.
新冠疫情与心理健康问题发生率上升有关，尤其是在年轻人中。
我们对新冠疫情之前和期间在线工作者的心理健康状况，以及2020年疫情早期阶段的认知情况进行了量化。完成了一项预先注册的数据分析计划，检验以下三个假设：与奖励相关的行为会随着年龄增长保持不变；认知表现会随着年龄下降；与疫情之前相比，疫情期间情绪症状会恶化。我们还进行了探索性分析，包括对潜在认知参数的贝叶斯计算建模。
比较了来自亚马逊土耳其机器人（MTurk）平台18至76岁的两个样本的在线工作者自我报告的抑郁（患者健康问卷8）和焦虑（广泛性焦虑障碍7）患病率：2018年新冠疫情之前（ = 799）和2020年新冠疫情期间（ = 233）。新冠疫情期间的样本还完成了一项基于浏览器的神经认知测试组合。
我们发现预先注册的三个假设中有两个得到了支持。值得注意的是，我们关于新冠疫情期间样本的心理健康症状会比新冠疫情之前样本增加的假设没有得到支持：两组都报告了很高的心理健康负担，尤其是年轻的在线工作者。在新冠疫情期间的样本中，较高的心理健康症状与对认知表现（速度/准确性权衡）的负面影响有关。我们发现两个假设得到了支持：在测试的三项注意力任务中的两项中，反应时间随着年龄增长而减慢，而奖励功能和准确性似乎随着年龄增长得以保留。
本研究发现了很高的心理健康负担，尤其是在年轻的在线工作者中，以及对认知功能的相关负面影响。
