COVID-19 lockdown consequences on body mass index and perceived fragility related to physical activity: A worldwide cohort study.

BACKGROUND: This paper is a follow-up study continuing the COVISTRESS network previous research regarding health-related determinants. OBJECTIVE: The aim was to identify the main consequences of COVID-19 lockdown on Body Mass Index and Perceived Fragility, related to Physical Activity (PA), for different categories of populations, worldwide. DESIGN: The study design included an online survey, during the first wave of COVID-19 lockdown, across different world regions. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: The research was carried out on 10 121 participants from 67 countries. The recruitment of participants was achieved using snowball sampling techniques via social networks, with no exclusion criteria other than social media access. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Body Mass Index, Physical Activity, Perceived Fragility and risk of getting infected items were analysed. SPSS software, v20, was used. Significance was set at P < .05. RESULTS: Body Mass Index significantly increased during lockdown. For youth and young adults (18-35 years), PA decreased by 31.25%, for adults (36-65 years) by 26.05% and for the elderly (over 65 years) by 30.27%. There was a high level of Perceived Fragility and risk of getting infected for female participants and the elderly. Correlations between BMI, Perceived Fragility and PA were identified. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: The research results extend and confirm evidence that the elderly are more likely to be at risk, by experiencing weight gain, physical inactivity and enhanced Perceived Fragility. As a consequence, populations need to counteract the constraints imposed by the lockdown by being physically active.

Computer-assisted instruction versus inquiry-based learning: The importance of working memory capacity.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led millions of students worldwide to intensify their use of digital education. This massive change is not reflected by the scant scientific research on the effectiveness of methods relying on digital learning compared to other innovative and more popular methods involving face-to-face interactions. Here, we tested the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) in Science and Technology compared to inquiry-based learning (IBL), another modern method which, however, requires students to interact with each other in the classroom. Our research also considered socio-cognitive factors-working memory (WM), socioeconomic status (SES), and academic self-concept (ASC)-known to predict academic performance but usually ignored in research on IBL and CAI. Five hundred and nine middle-school students, a fairly high sample size compared with relevant studies, received either IBL or CAI for a period varying from four to ten weeks prior to the Covid-19 events. After controlling for students' prior knowledge and socio-cognitive factors, multilevel modelling showed that CAI was more effective than IBL. Although CAI-related benefits were stable across students' SES and ASC, they were particularly pronounced for those with higher WM capacity. While indicating the need to adapt CAI for students with poorer WM, these findings further justify the use of CAI both in normal times (without excluding other methods) and during pandemic episodes.

Attentional bias modification with a new paradigm: The effect of the Detection Engagement and Savoring Positivity (DESP) task on eye-tracking of attention.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: We tested the effect of a new Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) task - the Detection Engagement and Savoring Positivity (DESP) task - on attentional biases. The DESP is innovative in that it involves a procedure of savoring the positivity of various pictures. METHODS: Participants were randomly assigned to the DESP or to a placebo control condition (experiment 1; n = 38) or a condition controlling for savoring (experiment 2; n = 54) in a pre-post/training experimental design. During one week, the participants completed the DESP or the control task once a day between three and six times. We assessed the effects of the DESP task on various attentional biases (i.e. positive, negative and threat) by computing dwell time from an eye-tracking technology before and after the training, and also one week after the post-training session in experiment 2. RESULTS: In both experiments, the attentional bias toward positive stimuli between the pre- and the post-training increased significantly more in the DESP task condition than in the control conditions. Negative and threat attentional biases were not significantly affected by the experimental manipulations. Experiment 2 revealed that the DESP task - including the savoring instruction - increased significantly more the positive attentional bias than a task excluding this step and that this effect remained significant one week after the post-training session. LIMITATIONS: Our samples were mainly composed of women participants. This prevents generalization of the findings. CONCLUSIONS: The DESP task offers promising perspectives for sustainably improving attention to positive information.

Sonority as a Phonological Cue in Early Perception of Written Syllables in French.

Many studies focused on the letter and sound co-occurrences to account for the well-documented syllable-based effects in French in visual (pseudo)word processing. Although these language-specific statistical properties are crucial, recent data suggest that studies that go all-in on phonological and orthographic regularities may be misguided in interpreting how-and why-readers locate syllable boundaries and segment clusters. Indeed, syllable-based effects could depend on more abstract, universal phonological constraints that rule and govern how letter and sound occur and co-occur, and readers could be sensitive to sonority-a universal phonological element-for processing (pseudo)words. Here, we investigate whether French adult skilled readers rely on universal phonological sonority-related markedness continuum across the syllable boundaries for segmentation (e.g., from marked, illegal intervocalic clusters /zl/ to unmarked, legal intervocalic clusters /lz/). To address this question, we ran two tasks with 128 French adult skilled readers using two versions of the illusory conjunction paradigm (Task 1 without white noise; Task 2 with white noise). Our results show that syllable location and segmentation in reading is early and automatically modulated by phonological sonority-related markedness in the absence or quasi-absence of statistical information and does not require acoustic-phonetic information. We discuss our results toward the overlooked role of phonological universals and the over-trusted role of statistical information during reading processes.

An Assessment of the Novel COVISTRESS Questionnaire: COVID-19 Impact on Physical Activity, Sedentary Action and Psychological Emotion.

Globally the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has triggered an economic downturn and a rise in unemployment. As a result, global communities have had to face physical, health, psychological and socio-economical related stressors. The purpose of this study was to assess and report the impact of isolation and effect of coronavirus on selected psychological correlates associated with emotions. Following ethical approval, a mixed methods observational study was conducted using the validated COVISTRESS questionnaire. Two observational study scenarios were evaluated namely "Prior" to the COVID-19 outbreak and "Currently", i.e., during the COVID-19 pandemic. 10,121 participants from 67 countries completed the COVISTRESS questionnaire. From the questionnaire responses only questions that covered the participant's occupation; sociodemographic details, isolation and impact of coronavirus were selected. Further analyses were performed on output measures that included leisure time, physical activity, sedentary time and emotions. All output measures were evaluated using the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) with an intensity ranging from 0-100. Descriptive statistics, Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Spearman correlational analysis were applied to the leisure time, physical activity, sedentary time and emotional feeling datasets; p = 0.05 was set as the significance level. Both males and females displayed similar output measures. The Wilcoxon signed rank test showed significant differences with respect to "Prior" COVID-19 and "Currently" for sedentary activity (Z = -40.462, p < 0.001), physical activity (Z = -30.751, p < 0.001) and all other emotional feeling output measures. A moderate correlation between "Prior" COVID-19 and "Currently" was observed among the Males (r = 0.720) in comparison to the Females (r = 0.639) for sedentary activity while weaker correlations (r < 0.253) were observed for physical activity and emotional feeling measurements, respectively. Our study reported incremental differences in the physical and psychological output measures reported, i.e., "Prior" COVID-19 and "Currently". "Prior" COVID-19 and "Currently" participants increased their sedentary habits by 2.98%, and the level of physical activity reduced by 2.42%, depression levels increased by 21.62%, anxiety levels increased by 16.71%, and stress levels increased by 21.8%. There were no correlations (r) between leisure, physical activity and sedentary action (i.e., "Prior" = -0.071; "Currently" = -0.097); no correlations (r) between leisure physical activity and emotion (i.e., -0.071 > r > 0.081) for "Prior"; and poor correlations (r) between leisure, physical activity and sedentary action (i.e., -0.078 > r > 0.167) for "Current". The correlations (r) between sedentary action and emotion for "Prior" and "Currently" were (-0.100 > r > 0.075) and (-0.040 > r > 0.041) respectively. The findings presented here indicate that the COVISTRESS project has created awareness in relation to the physical and psychological impact resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings have also highlighted individual distress caused by COVID-19 and associated health consequences for the global community.

The explicit judgment of long durations of several minutes in everyday life: Conscious retrospective memory judgment and the role of affects?

In this study, individuals estimated interval times of several minutes (from 2 to 32 minutes) during their everyday lives using a cell phone they kept with them. Their emotional state, the difficulty of the activity performed during this interval, and the attention that it required were also assessed, together with their subjective experience of the passage of time. The results showed that the mean time estimates and their variability increased linearly with increasing interval duration, indicating that the fundamental scalar property of time found for short durations also applies to very long durations of several minutes. In addition, the emotional state and difficulty of the activity were significant predictors of the judgment of long durations. However, the awareness of the passage of time appeared to play a crucial role in the judgment of very long duration in humans. A theory on the emergence of the awareness of the passage of time and how it affects the judgment of interval durations lasting several minutes is therefore discussed.

Emotion and Implicit Timing: The Arousal Effect.

This study tested the effects of emotion on implicit time judgment. The participants did not receive any overt temporal instructions. They were simply trained to respond as quickly as possible after a response signal, which was separated from a warning signal by a reference temporal interval. In the testing phase, the inter-signal interval was shorter, equal or longer than the reference interval and was filled by emotional pictures (EP) of different arousal levels: high, moderate, and low. The results showed a U-shaped curve of reaction time plotted against the interval duration, indicating an implicit processing of time. However, this RT-curve was shifted toward the left, with a significantly lower peak time for the high-arousal than for the low-arousal EP. This emotional time distortion in an implicit timing task suggests an automatic effect of emotion on the internal clock rate.