A new study has demonstrated that personal memories of Covid-19 lockdowns can predict declines in psychological wellbeing of children and adolescents.
The study investigated personal memories among children and adolescents of Denmark’s the first lockdown in 2020, and how this may have impacted their psychological wellbeing over the following year.
The findings revealed that the psychological wellbeing of adolescent females fared the worst, and that memories which included more factual information about Covid-19 as well as more negative affect, predicted more robust declines in psychological wellbeing.
The researchers suggest these findings underscore how aspects of personal memories might help exacerbate or attenuate the negative consequences of the experience of Covid-19.
The study was carried out by the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, University of California, Riverside and University of California, Davis in the United States.
Semantic details vs episodic details
Researchers suggest that future work might benefit from investigating how children’s relative tendency to include semantic details – facts about Covid-19 – versus episodic details – where they were when they first heard about lockdowns, what specific interaction happened with family or friends, for example – in their narratives might be linked to children’s and adolescents’ psychological adjustment and coping in difficult times.
The Society for Research in Child Development had the opportunity to discuss this research with Dr. Tirill Fjellhaugen Hjuler from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Aarhus University Hospital and Dr. Simona Ghetti from the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis.
SRCD: What led you to study how the Covid-19 pandemic affected children and adolescents in Denmark?
Dr. Hjuler: As lockdown policies began to be implemented across the world, scholars and lay people alike started asking how they would impact children and teens. Different positions were debated ranging from sobering concerns for their mental health to expectations of increased resilience, which were all based on little direct knowledge of how the effects of an event of the magnitude of this pandemic would manifest. We deemed it necessary to conduct a longitudinal study to seek empirical answers to the many questions our society was grappling with.
Dr. Ghetti: I want to add a word of praise about Dr. Hjuler’s ingenuity. At the time, she was a graduate student planning to spend a year visiting my laboratory. As the Covid-19 pandemic shut the world down, she immediately appreciated the importance of turning to her community and pivoting to address different research questions than originally planned.
Examining autobiographical memory about lockdown periods provided an unprecedented vantage point on how children and adolescents experienced and were affected by this global event. Success in graduate school is often about understanding how to ask the right question at the right time.
SRCD: Can you please provide a brief overview of the study?
Dr. Hjuler: We examined the longitudinal associations between the content of personal memories for the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and children’s and adolescents’ (8- to 16-year-olds) mental health. Participants were assessed three times (June 2020, January 2021 and June 2021). At each time point, they were asked to write about their personal memory from the first lockdown and to assess their psychological wellbeing and depressive symptoms. All the memories were then coded for content such as the emotional tone, episodic details and semantic (i.e., factual) information about Covid-19 in general.
First, we found that children’s and adolescents’ mental health decreased over time, and that adolescent females fared the worst at all time points. Second, we found that the content of memories lost detail over time, in terms of episodic specificity, semantic content, and emotional valence. Critically, we found that children and adolescents whose narratives contained more negative emotional content and included more factual information about Covid-19 and the resulting restrictions, fared the worst over time.
SRCD: How can these findings be useful for parents and caregivers, policymakers, and educators interested in the wellbeing of children and adolescents?
Dr. Hjuler and Dr. Ghetti: Our findings suggest that the way children and adolescents remember and reflect upon difficult times, such as the Covid-19 lockdowns, might affect their mental health over time. We have known from previous research that there are associations between the emotional content of personal memories and indicators of psychological adjustment. Here, we are demonstrating a longitudinal association linking directly negative emotionality in narratives concerning events of global significance to measures of future wellbeing.
One interesting finding is that integrating higher levels of factual information about difficult times also seems to have a negative impact on children’s and adolescents’ mental health. Imbuing factual information in a personal narrative may be a sign that children and teenagers attempted to distance themselves from the personally unique meaning of the lockdown experience. Thus, adults ought to be aware of how information about potential difficult times is discussed and communicated: observing certain content during child reminiscing may provide insight on risks for wellbeing.
SRCD: Were you surprised by any of the findings?
Dr. Hjuler and Dr. Ghetti: Yes, we were particularly surprised to find a decrease in the memories’ negative emotional content over time as actually we expected an increase in negativity, reflecting the burden of facing the continued consequences of the pandemic over time. It is possible that this is because our analysis focused on memories for the first lockdown and by the time we assessed them later, other memories for the pandemic became more dominant or emotionally relevant. Moreover, as children and adolescents during lockdowns were restricted from in-person socialization and were unable to leave their residence over extended periods of time, their experiences became less unique and more schematized.
Despite this normative change, the participants whose narratives were rated as conveying greater negative emotionality did worse over time, underscoring the importance of that early emotional content for participants’ wellbeing.
SRCD: What’s next in this field of research?
Dr. Hjuler: We believe that future work might benefit from investigating how both factual and episodic information in personal memories might be linked to children’s and adolescents’ psychological adjustment and coping in difficult times. In addition, future research should examine how memory narratives concerning challenging times, such as the lockdowns, might be different from other types of children’s narratives, including children’s and adolescents’ personal memories about other relevant events and thoughts about the future.
Only by examining the content of all these different memories will we know if these results reported here are specific to the first period of the pandemic, when radical changes in children’s and adolescents’ lives occurred, or if instead our patterns of results extend to other forms of remembering and imagining pandemic-related experiences.
