Teen girls had worst mental affects of COVID-19 lockdowns: study

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

Teenage girls were worst affected mentally by pandemic lockdowns compared to other youngsters, according to new research.

The study is believed to be the first to assess whether personal memories predicted declines in the psychological well-being of eight- to 16-year-olds during the pandemic.

Participants were assessed three times during the pandemic. They were asked to write about their personal memory from the first lockdown and to assess their psychological well-being and depressive symptoms.

The "unprecedented" research shows that the mental health of adolescent females fared the worst, according to the findings published in the journal Child Development.

The American and Danish team also found that memories that included more factual information about COVID-19 and included more negative effects predicted more "robust" declines in mental well-being.

The team says their findings underscore how aspects of personal memories might help increase or reduce the negative consequences of the experience of the COVID-19 lockdowns from March 2020 to July 2021.

Researchers from Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, the University of California, Riverside, and the University of California, Davis, investigated youngsters' personal memories of the first lockdown in Denmark in 2020 - and how they may have impacted their psychological well-being over the following year.

Similar to elsewhere, a steep rise in COVID-19 infections in Denmark in late 2020 led to a second school closure from December 17, 2020, until May 6, 2021.

As well as closing schools, more extensive government-enforced lockdown measures in Denmark included the closure of restaurants and cinemas, social distancing, work-from-home orders and mask mandates.

Dr. Tiril Fiellhaugen Hjuler, of Aarhus University Hospital, said: "As lockdown policies began to be implemented across the world, scholars and lay people alike started asking how they would impact children and teens.

"Different positions were debated ranging from sobering concerns for their mental health to expectations of increased resilience, which were all based on little direct knowledge of how the effects of an event of the magnitude of this pandemic would manifest.

"We deemed it necessary to conduct a longitudinal study to seek empirical answers to the many questions our society was grappling with.

"We found that children’s and adolescents’ mental health decreased over time and that adolescent females fared the worst at all time points.

"Second, we found that the content of memories lost detail over time, in terms of episodic specificity, semantic content, and emotional valence.

"Critically, we found that children and adolescents whose narratives contained more negative emotional content and included more factual information about COVID-19 and the resulting restrictions, fared the worst over time."

She added: "Our findings suggest that the way children and adolescents remember and reflect upon difficult times, such as the COVID-19 lockdowns, might affect their mental health over time.

"We have known from previous research that there are associations between the emotional content of personal memories and indicators of psychological adjustment.

"Here, we are demonstrating a longitudinal association linking directly negative emotionality in narratives concerning events of global significance to measures of future well-being.

"One interesting finding is that integrating higher levels of factual information about difficult times also seems to have a negative impact on children’s and adolescents’ mental health.

"Imbuing factual information in a personal narrative may be a sign that children and teenagers attempted to distance themselves from the personally unique meaning of the lockdown experience.

"Thus, adults ought to be aware of how information about potential difficult times is discussed and communicated: observing certain content during child reminiscing may provide insight on risks for well-being."

Study co-author Dr. Simona Ghetti, of the University of California, Davis, said: "Examining autobiographical memory about lockdown periods provided an unprecedented vantage point on how children and adolescents experienced and were affected by this global event.

"We were particularly surprised to find a decrease in the memories’ negative emotional content over time as actually we expected an increase in negativity, reflecting the burden of facing the continued consequences of the pandemic over time.

"It is possible that this is because our analysis focused on memories for the first lockdown and by the time we assessed them later, other memories for the pandemic became more dominant or emotionally relevant.

"Moreover, as children and adolescents during lockdowns were restricted from in-person socialization and were unable to leave their residence over extended periods of time, their experiences became less unique and more schematized.

"Despite this normative change, the participants whose narratives were rated as conveying greater negative emotionality did worse over time, underscoring the importance of that early emotional content for participants’ well-being."

Dr. Hjuler added: "Future research should examine how memory narratives concerning challenging times, such as the lockdowns, might be different from other types of children’s narratives, including children’s and adolescents' personal memories about other relevant events and thoughts about the future.

"Only by examining the content of all these different memories will we know if these results reported here are specific to the first period of the pandemic when radical changes in children’s and adolescents’ lives occurred, or if instead, our patterns of results extend to other forms of remembering and imagining pandemic-related experiences."