How did the beginnings of the global COVID-19 pandemic affect mental well-being?

The present study aims to investigate longitudinal changes in mental well-being as well as the role of individual differences in personality traits (Big Five) and the level of Personality Organisation during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Overall, 272 adults (Mage= 36.94, SDage= 16.46; 68.62% female, 23.45% male, 0.69% non-binary) took part in our study with four weekly surveys during the lockdown as well as a follow-up one month after restrictions were lifted. To analyse the development of mental well-being during and shortly after the first lockdown in Germany latent growth curve models (LGCM) were calculated. The considered facets of well-being differ by their trajectory. Additionally, results suggest that the lockdown did not affect all facets to the same extent. While Life Satisfaction decreases in the short term as a reaction to the lockdown, Stress and Psychological Strain were reduced after the second week of contact restrictions. When adding personality characteristics, our results showed that Neuroticism and Conscientiousness were the two dimensions associated most strongly with SWB during the first month of the pandemic. Thus, our research suggests that personality traits should be considered when analysing mental well-being.

Testing Replicability and Generalizability of the Time on Task Effect.

The time on task (ToT) effect describes the relationship of the time spent on a cognitive task and the probability of successful task completion. The effect has been shown to vary in size and direction across tests and even within tests, depending on the test taker and item characteristics. Specifically, investing more time has a positive effect on response accuracy for difficult items and low ability test-takers, but a negative effect for easy items and high ability test-takers. The present study sought to test the replicability of this result pattern of the ToT effect across samples independently drawn from the same populations of persons and items. Furthermore, its generalizability was tested in terms of differential correlations across ability tests. To this end, ToT effects were estimated for three different reasoning tests and one test measuring natural sciences knowledge in 10 comparable subsamples with a total N = 2640. Results for the subsamples were highly similar, demonstrating that ToT effects are estimated with sufficient reliability. Generally, faster answers tended to be more accurate, suggesting a relatively effortless processing style. However, with increasing item difficulty and decreasing person ability, the effect flipped to the opposite direction, i.e., higher accuracy with longer processing times. The within-task moderation of the ToT effect can be reconciled with an account on effortful processing or cognitive load. By contrast, the generalizability of the ToT effect across different tests was only moderate. Cross-test relations were stronger in relative terms if performance in the respective tasks was more strongly related. This suggests that individual differences in the ToT effect depend on test characteristics such as their reliabilities but also similarities and differences of their processing requirements.