Iron fists and velvet gloves: Investigating the associations between the stringency of governments' responses to COVID-19, stress, and compliance in the early stages of the pandemic.

To tackle the spread of COVID-19, governments worldwide have implemented restrictive public health behavioural measures. Whether and when these measures lead to positive or negative psychological outcomes is still debated. In this study, drawing on a large sample of individuals (Ntotal  = 89,798) from 45 nations, we investigated whether the stringency of public health measures implemented at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March-May 2020 was associated with individuals' levels of stress and compliance. Moreover, we addressed the question of how these associations may be moderated by the measures' implementation lag, nations' tolerance for unequal distributions of power (i.e., power distance), and individuals' institutional trust. Linear mixed models suggested that slower implementation of less stringent measures was associated with higher stress and lower compliance. Also, rapid implementation of stricter measures was associated with a mild increase in stress. Such effects were especially pronounced in countries with less tolerance for inequality. Albeit significant, the moderating effect of institutional trust was very small. The results suggest that it may be important to consider the measures' implementation lag when tackling the spread of COVID-19, but findings should be interpreted in relation to the data collection period.

COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey dataset on psychological and behavioural consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak.

This N = 173,426 social science dataset was collected through the collaborative COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey - an open science effort to improve understanding of the human experiences of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic between 30th March and 30th May, 2020. The dataset allows a cross-cultural study of psychological and behavioural responses to the Coronavirus pandemic and associated government measures like cancellation of public functions and stay at home orders implemented in many countries. The dataset contains demographic background variables as well as measures of Asian Disease Problem, perceived stress (PSS-10), availability of social provisions (SPS-10), trust in various authorities, trust in governmental measures to contain the virus (OECD trust), personality traits (BFF-15), information behaviours, agreement with the level of government intervention, and compliance with preventive measures, along with a rich pool of exploratory variables and written experiences. A global consortium from 39 countries and regions worked together to build and translate a survey with variables of shared interests, and recruited participants in 47 languages and dialects. Raw plus cleaned data and dynamic visualizations are available.

All categories are equal, but some categories are more equal than others: The psychometric structure of object and face cognition.

Recent research on individual differences in object cognition (OC) focused on determining how objects group together, and what type of processing lies behind the clusters-a single domain-general or multiple domain-specific processes. The expertise hypothesis suggests that all object categories are processed by the same mechanism that is responsible for differentiating visually similar objects. This ability is expected to be more specifically expressed in processing objects for which people have higher expertise. The domain-specificity hypothesis postulates that different object categories, for example, living versus nonliving objects, are processed employing different mechanisms. In the present study we aimed to study (a) how multiple objects group together in terms of individual differences; (b) the expertise hypothesis based on up-to-date statistical methods of modeling individual differences; (c) whether task difficulty influences the structure of individual differences in OC. We applied a memory task to N = 186 participants, by using multiple, theoretically chosen object categories divided into five groups-living/mobile (fish, butterflies), living/immobile (flowers, leaves), nonliving/mobile (cars, motorbikes), nonliving/immobile (houses, chairs) and faces-and report three main findings. (a) In terms of individual differences, the factor space of OC can be accounted by three factors-general OC factor along with a specific Vehicle and Face factor; (b) there is no clear evidence for the expertise hypothesis; and (c) task difficulty does not influence the OC structure. We conclude that domain-specific mechanisms in object processing cannot be dismissed. (PsycINFO Database Record