Before and after the quarantine: An approximate study on the psychological impact of COVID-19 on the italian population during the lockdown period

COVID-19 (Corona-Virus Disease 2019) in Italy and the measures that were adopted to contain its diffusion had a strong impact on people’s quality of life and mental health. The objective of the study was to quantify the psychological impact of the lockdown period on the general Italian population during the two weeks when the COVID-19 emergency in Italy was at its peak. The study (1556 adults) was conducted from April 6th to April 12th, 2020. A survey was developed through Google Forms in order to assess different psychological measures (Self Efficacy, Locus of Control, Social Connectedness, Sense of Virtual Community, Flourishing, Positive and Negative Affect, Life Satisfaction, and Risk Propensity). The results were then compared to reference data. Thelockdown period increased arousal mainly for negative emotions, but also for positive emotions, and quality of life seemed to be reduced. From a psychosocial point of view, while social connectedness has decreased during lockdown, probably because of isolation and social distancing, the virtual social community seemed to increase in the same period. Interestingly, we revealed how self efficacy increased during the lockdown period, and, at the same time, the Locus of control appeared as externalized, and the risk propensity as reduced. The results are discussed considering previous literature, and a coherent theoretical framework is proposed in order to refine the forecasting model for the psychological impact of the lockdown

Collaborative facilitation and collaborative inhibition in virtual environments

Worldwide, organizations and small and medium-sized enterprises have already disruptively changed in many ways their physiological inner mechanisms, because of information and communication technologies (ICT) revolution. Nevertheless, the still ongoing COVID-19 worldwide emergency definitely promoted a wide adoption of teleworking modalities for many people around the world, making it more relevant than before to understand the real impact of virtual environments (VEs) on teamwork dynamics. From a psychological point of view, a critical question about teleworking modalities is how the social and cognitive dynamics of collaborative facilitation and collaborative inhibition would affect teamwork within VEs. This study analyzed the impact of a virtual environment (VE) on the recall of individuals and members of nominal and collaborative groups. The research assessed costs and benefits for collaborative retrieval by testing the effect of experimental conditions, stimulus materials, group size, experimental conditions order, anxiety state, personality traits, gender group composition and social interactions. A total of 144 participants were engaged in a virtual Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) classical paradigm, which involved remembering word lists across two successive sessions, in one of four protocols: I-individual/nominal, I I -nominal/individual, I I I -nominal/collaborative, I V -collaborative/nominal. Results suggested, in general, a reduced collaborative inhibition effect in the collaborative condition than the nominal and individual condition. A combined effect between experimental condition and difficulty of the task appears to explain the presence of collaborative inhibition or facilitation. Nominal groups appeared to enhance the collaborative groups’ performance when virtual nominal groups come before collaborative groups. Variables such as personality traits, gender and social interactions may have a contribution to collaborative retrieval. In conclusion, this study indicated how VEs could maintain those peculiar social dynamics characterizing the participants’ engagement in a task, both working together and individually, and could affect their intrinsic motivation as well as performances. These results could be exploited in order to design brand new and evidenced-based practices, to improve teleworking procedures and workers well-being, as well as teleworking teamwork effectiveness.</jats:p

Meet, Discuss and Trust each other: large versus small groups

In this paper we propose a dynamical interpretation of the sociological distinction between large and small groups of interacting individuals. In the former case individual behaviors are largely dominated by the group effect, while in the latter mutual relationships do matter. Numerical and analytical tools are combined to substantiate our claims.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure