Investigating the relationship of COVID-19 related stress and media consumption with schizotypy, depression, and anxiety in cross-sectional surveys repeated throughout the pandemic in Germany and the UK

Article activity feed

1. 

   Version published to 10.7554/elife.75893 on eLife

   Jul 4, 2022
2. 

   eLife

   May 9, 2022

   Author Response

   Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

   The authors succeeded in providing a well-done investigation on the psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The major strength of this manuscript is the sound methodology and the huge sample size recruited for the investigations of study aims. Another strength of this manuscript is incorporating the role of social media in this issue. No major weakness is apparent in this investigation.

   Thank you for your careful review of our work. Your feedback helps us a lot to improve our manuscript. We have worked through your comments point by point and adjusted our manuscript accordingly.

   Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

   Daimer et. al investigated cross-sectional associations using an online survey for assessing the association of 2 predictor factors (i.e., life concerns of COVID-19 and …

   Author Response

   Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

   The authors succeeded in providing a well-done investigation on the psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The major strength of this manuscript is the sound methodology and the huge sample size recruited for the investigations of study aims. Another strength of this manuscript is incorporating the role of social media in this issue. No major weakness is apparent in this investigation.

   Thank you for your careful review of our work. Your feedback helps us a lot to improve our manuscript. We have worked through your comments point by point and adjusted our manuscript accordingly.

   Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

   Daimer et. al investigated cross-sectional associations using an online survey for assessing the association of 2 predictor factors (i.e., life concerns of COVID-19 and social relationships) with 3 mental health outcomes namely schizotypal trait, depression, and anxiety related symptoms. The authors also assessed for mediating factors such as sleep duration, alcohol consumption, drug use, social media exposure, etc. and finally explored any mediating effects of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the association between the predictor factors with schizotypal trait. The main take-away message of the analysis is the direct positive associations observed for COVID-19-related concerns, social adversity with the mental health outcomes and also to some extent via the mediating effects of excessive media use.

   The conclusions of this paper are mostly well supported by statistical analysis; however, some biases need to emphasized as limitations.

   Thank you for your careful review of our manuscript and your comments and suggestions for improvement. We have edited and added them in the paper. See below for a detailed response to your suggestions.

   1. Authors do not address the plausible reasons for their finding on the association of more exercise with higher levels of anxiety.

   Thank you for pointing that out. This association is interesting, as it contradicts general findings, of the positive impact of exercise and mental health. Here, however, we may need to consider that gyms, swimming pools, sports classes were closed or cancelled during the pandemic, forcing individuals to compensate with other types of exercise, which might lead to frustration or anxiety. We have expanded the section on this in the discussions.

   P34/35: “We did not find a negative association between COVID related life concerns and physical activity; however, we found a positive association between physical activity and mental health scores; indicating that more physical activity is associated with higher anxiety in the September/ October 2020 survey and May 2021 survey. This is surprising and contradicts a large body of literature showing the positive effect of exercise on levels of anxiety, depression and stress (for review see (Mikkelsen et al., 2017)). However, people who play sports frequently may have suffered more from the pandemic containment measures, which included severe restrictions on the execution of sports. Here, especially team sports are affected, which combines positive social interaction with sports. In order to compensate, affected individuals may over-compensate with individual sports which lacked the social component. The associations found in our surveys occurred when general restrictions were lower, therefore, more exercise potentially means an increased risk of exposure to potentially infected individuals, for example, in gyms. A study by Mehrsafar et al. showed that among professional athletes, isolation from their athletic team, reduced activity and training, lack of formal coaching, and lack of social support from fans and media triggered emotional distress (Mehrsafar et al., 2020). A third possibility could be that individuals started exercising more frequency and regularly during the pandemic as a result of loneliness, boredom or the knowledge of positive effects of sports on anxiety and depression; however, sport alone cannot completely protect against mental health problems (Pensgaard et al., 2021).”

   1. Though the authors have stated the uncertainty of the observed associations but do not fully discuss its reasons, e.g., the sampling bias (i.e., recruitment via social media will lead to disproportionately selecting participants with excessive media consumption leading to biased associations) or volunteer bias (i.e., if some age-group/one particular gender/particular educational category are more likely to participate than others) which are inherent to this type of study designs.

   Thank you for pointing this out. We have added a paragraph in limitation section in the discussion, see our response to point 4 in essential revisions above.

   P37: “Second, the sample might be biased due to the recruitment strategy. Recruitment was performed through print and social media; however, the questionnaire was only available online, so people without internet access or less ability in using the internet were either excluded from participation or had to rely on people guiding them through the survey. This especially applies to older individuals, who have less access to the internet than young people (Prescott, 2021; Quittschalle et al., 2020). However, we were able to recruit individuals from ages 18-93, with 16.73% aged above 60, which shows a good general representation of age. Since excessive media consumption was investigated in this study, the recruitment strategy, especially via the Internet, may have led to a bias, reaching a disproportionately large number of people who use media excessively. However, in the first investigation (Knolle et al., 2021) using the same recruitment strategy we found that media consumption increased during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to prior to the pandemic. Also, a sampling bias may have occurred over-representing individuals attracted to the topic of mental health (Andrade, 2020), which could one the one hand heighten the strength of the observed associations compared with a representative general population sample and on the other explain the overrepresentation of individuals with higher educational backgrounds. Biases like these are difficult to overcome especially in psychological research. These limitations may affect the generalizability and representativeness of the study.”

   Read the original source
3. 

   eLife

   May 9, 2022

   Evaluation Summary:

   This paper is a cross-sectional assessment of the association between COVID-19 related stress and mental wellbeing and whether certain behaviors mediate this association. This work would be of interest to researchers, psychologists, and clinicians involved in the psychological impact of COVID-19. The strength of this work is two folds. First, this is an important and timely topic. The collection of primary data at four time points during the pandemic was innovative. Second, examining the mediatory effects of certain behaviors could shed light on ways to reduce pandemic-related stresses. Future work should address a few limitations, including the inherent biases of using social media as a recruitment strategy and the lack of generalizability.

   (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews …

   Evaluation Summary:

   This paper is a cross-sectional assessment of the association between COVID-19 related stress and mental wellbeing and whether certain behaviors mediate this association. This work would be of interest to researchers, psychologists, and clinicians involved in the psychological impact of COVID-19. The strength of this work is two folds. First, this is an important and timely topic. The collection of primary data at four time points during the pandemic was innovative. Second, examining the mediatory effects of certain behaviors could shed light on ways to reduce pandemic-related stresses. Future work should address a few limitations, including the inherent biases of using social media as a recruitment strategy and the lack of generalizability.

   (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Read the original source
4. 

   eLife

   May 9, 2022

   Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

   The authors succeeded in providing a well-done investigation on the psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The major strength of this manuscript is the sound methodology and the huge sample size recruited for the investigations of study aims. Another strength of this manuscript is incorporating the role of social media in this issue. No major weakness is apparent in this investigation.

   Read the original source
5. 

   eLife

   May 9, 2022

   Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

   Daimer et. al investigated cross-sectional associations using an online survey for assessing the association of 2 predictor factors (i.e., life concerns of COVID-19 and social relationships) with 3 mental health outcomes namely schizotypal trait, depression, and anxiety related symptoms. The authors also assessed for mediating factors such as sleep duration, alcohol consumption, drug use, social media exposure, etc. and finally explored any mediating effects of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the association between the predictor factors with schizotypal trait. The main take-away message of the analysis is the direct positive associations observed for COVID-19-related concerns, social adversity with the mental health outcomes and also to some extent via the mediating effects of excessive media use.

   The …

   Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

   Daimer et. al investigated cross-sectional associations using an online survey for assessing the association of 2 predictor factors (i.e., life concerns of COVID-19 and social relationships) with 3 mental health outcomes namely schizotypal trait, depression, and anxiety related symptoms. The authors also assessed for mediating factors such as sleep duration, alcohol consumption, drug use, social media exposure, etc. and finally explored any mediating effects of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the association between the predictor factors with schizotypal trait. The main take-away message of the analysis is the direct positive associations observed for COVID-19-related concerns, social adversity with the mental health outcomes and also to some extent via the mediating effects of excessive media use.

   The conclusions of this paper are mostly well supported by statistical analysis; however, some biases need to emphasized as limitations.

   1. Authors do not address the plausible reasons for their finding on the association of more exercise with higher levels of anxiety.

   2. Though the authors have stated the uncertainty of the observed associations but do not fully discuss its reasons, e.g., the sampling bias (i.e., recruitment via social media will lead to disproportionately selecting participants with excessive media consumption leading to biased associations) or volunteer bias (i.e., if some age-group/one particular gender/particular educational category are more likely to participate than others) which are inherent to this type of study designs.

   Read the original source
6. 

   ScreenIT

   Dec 1, 2021

   SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.26.21266896: (What is this?)

   Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

   Table 1: Rigor

   NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

   Table 2: Resources

   No key resources detected.

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   Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

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   Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:

   There are several limitations to our study. First, in this analysis we investigate four different samples collected at different time points within one year from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the samples are highly comparable, and we adjust for observed differences between them in our models, we cannot adjust for …

   SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.26.21266896: (What is this?)

   Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

   Table 1: Rigor

   NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

   Table 2: Resources

   No key resources detected.

   ---

   Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

   ---

   Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:

   There are several limitations to our study. First, in this analysis we investigate four different samples collected at different time points within one year from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the samples are highly comparable, and we adjust for observed differences between them in our models, we cannot adjust for unmeasured confounding. Thus, we cannot definitively say that the altered associations observed throughout the pandemic are related to genuine changes in these relationships, and thus reflect the changing impact of the pandemic. Second, an adequate fit is assumed for RMSEA of less than 0.06 and a CFI of greater than 0.90. Our models fulfil these criteria for the RMSEA, but are slightly lower for the CFI, ranging between 0.78-0.86. Our models are highly complex, with each model including five mediators and three outcomes. When reducing the complexity of the models, fit based on CFI meets threshold (≥0.9); however, for the sake of parsimony we present the full models. In conclusion, we found that social adversity and COVID-19 related concerns predicted higher schizotypal traits, and symptoms of depression and anxiety. We furthermore found that excessive media consumption (more than 4h a day) partially mediated these relationships. We identified the ameliorating potential of regular sleep on mental health, but especially on schizotypy. Overall, our study shows that during the handling of extreme situations such as a global pandemic which require lockdowns...

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   Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

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   Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

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   Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

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   Results from rtransparent:

   • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
   • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
   • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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   Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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   Read the original source
7. 

   Version published to 10.1101/2021.11.26.21266896v1 on medRxiv

   Nov 28, 2021