Trajectories of Parental Daily Stress: An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study during the COVID-19 Lockdown.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a source of significant stress due to health and safety concerns and measures to control the virus' spread, such as mobility restrictions. This measure was especially demanding for parents with school aged children, who had to find new work-family balance as their children participate in online education while attempting to work remotely. To evaluate parents' stress trajectories during the pandemic, we conducted Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMAs) during lockdown for 29 days in 68 families in Santiago, Chile. In addition, we evaluated the role of educational level and income, co-parenting, and number of children in parents' stress trajectories. Our results showed that during the first weeks of lockdown expected protective factors (i.e., income and co-parental support) were not able to influence parents' daily stress management. Moreover, parents with higher educational levels reported worse stress adaptation than less educated parents. On the other hand, co-parental conflict was significantly associated with parent's stress. Our study captured an acute response to COVID-19 related challenges. This study contributes to understanding how parents adjust to stress during adverse circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Corrigendum: Biological Stress Reactivity and Introspective Sensitivity: An Exploratory Study.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00543.].

Biological Stress Reactivity and Introspective Sensitivity: An Exploratory Study.

Reaction to stressful events has an impact on several cognitive processes. High levels of stress can be detrimental to working memory, attention and decision-making. Here, we investigated whether individuals' reactivity to stress is related to their introspective sensitivity (i.e., how well individuals monitor their own cognitive processes). To this aim, 27 participants (16 women, mean 20 years old) were exposed to a psychosocial stress protocol (trier social stress test, TSST), where individuals were asked to simulate a job interview and perform arithmetic calculations in front of a panel of experts. The salivary cortisol concentration, which is considered a hormonal index of stress reactivity, was collected during the TSST through the enzyme immunoassay DRG cortisol ELISA kit. Based on literature recommendations, we classified participants as responders and non-responders to the TSST. In a second session, through a visual search paradigm, we evaluated the introspective sensitivity of the participants. We evaluated how these individuals (i) monitor their own performance (through a confidence estimation), (ii) monitor their own attentional shifts (through a subjective number of scanned items estimation, SNSI), and (iii) monitor their own response times (through an introspective response time estimation, iRT). We found that individuals with lower biological reactivity to stress are more accurate in estimating their SNSI (p = 0.033) and iRT (p = 0.002), and in evaluating their own performance (p = 0.038) through their confidence. We argue that the effect of stress on introspection is not limited to a particular type of introspective evaluation, but rather consists of a general alteration of the introspective mechanism.