Everyday Research Methods

Has the pandemic changed people's personalities?

The study reported that average levels of extroversion, agreeableness,
and conscientiousness all went down from before the pandemic
when compared to a year after lockdowns. 
Credit: TheVisualsYouNeed/Deposit Photos

During the lockdowns of the pandemic, many researchers developed and tested interesting research questions. They collected data to test COVID-related hypotheses, and now many of those studies have completed the peer-review process and are coming out in publication. 

One such study was interested in whether the prolonged social isolation of the pandemic might have resulted in shifts in people's personality traits, on average. The study was covered by multiple media outlets, including the online magazine Fortune. The original empirical research is available open-acesss, in PLOS ONE. 

Researchers have long been interested in the question of how, and how much, people's personalities change. They've asked the extent to which people become more conscientious when they transition into a full-time job, or whether people become more agreeable as they get older. The study summarized by this journalist is in the same spirit. 

The Fortune journalist summarized the study this way: 

Past studies have found personalities are generally immune to environmental factors like hurricanes and earthquakes, but a group of researchers found that the global COVID-19 pandemic may be an exception. 

The researchers used data from the Understanding America Study of the University of Southern California to examine results from over 7,000 U.S. adults ages 18 to 109 before and during the pandemic. Personality was measured using a scale to assess five traits: neuroticism (is moody), openness (has an active imagination), conscientiousness (is a reliable worker), agreeableness (is generally trusting), and extraversion (is talkative).

The study echoed previous findings that neuroticism actually decreased from the period before the pandemic started to the early spring months of 2020, which may in part be because the beginning of the pandemic caused major outpourings of support with people rallying together and could have improved individual emotional stability, Sutin says. It may also be because people were able to point to a stressor as the reason for their overwhelm or anxiety versus blaming themselves, she speculates. 

However, as the pandemic wore on, personality traits changed more drastically. Measures of extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness all declined compared to participants’ pre-pandemic personalities. Experts say shifts like this usually take a decade.

Questions

a) This is a type of quasi-experiment. What is the quasi-experimental variable? What are the dependent variables? 

b) Which quasi-experimental design (from Chapter 13) best fits this study? Here are your options: Non-equivalent control group posttest-only design, Non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest design, Interrupted time series design, or Non-equivalent control group interrupted time series design?

c) Pick the dependent variable of extroversion. Sketch a graph of the results described by the journalist. If you want to follow the style of the graphs in the textbook, you would put time on the x-axis and extroversion on the y-axis. 

d) Now you can look at how the empirical study presented the results by looking at Figure 1 of the empirical article. The published graph probably looks different from yours (in c, above) in several ways. First, they don't show absolute levels of extroversion; instead, they graphed changes in extroversion--in 2020 and 2021, compared to a pre-panedemic baseline. Specifically, you will see a bar graph in which rates of each trait were either higher (positive bars) or lower (negative bars) than they were before the pandemic. You'll also see that they graphed these changes separately for different age groups. Study the bar graphs in Figure 1 and identify the traits and subgroups that had the largest changes. 

e) Think about the external validity of this study. The sample came from the Understanding America Survey. Visit the survey's website and see if you can figure out if the sample used in the study was collected using probability sampling techniques or not (hint: use their "methodology" tab).

 

Stress and food: experimental and quasi-experimental evidence

In one study, department store workers ate more unhealthy foods
when they were working more demanding shifts. Is such a study likely to be
an experiment, a quasi-experiment, or a correlational study?
Credit: 22January/Shutterstock

A Washington Post journalist integrated several health psychology studies in an article about the relationships between stress and eating. For many people, stress and anxiety is associated with weight gain. The journalist summarized several examples of studies that support, and help explain, this link. Read them and think about whether they are  experimental or quasi-experimental. 

Here's the first study the journalist described (we'll call it Study A):

In laboratory studies, scientists have found that administering synthetic versions of cortisol to people causes them to eat substantially more calories than people who are given a placebo. That’s in part because cortisol reduces your brain’s sensitivity to leptin, also known as the satiety hormone, which regulates your appetite and makes you feel full.

a) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

b) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

Here's the next one, which we'll call Study B:

In one study of department store workers, people ate more sugar, saturated fat and overall calories when they had to work long, demanding shifts compared with when they worked less stressful shifts with lighter workloads.

c) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

d) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

Here's another, which we'll call Study C:

Even stress from activities we enjoy can lead to overeating. In one study, researchers followed ardent football fans in different cities. They found that fans whose NFL teams lost on Sunday consumed more calories and saturated fat the next day. Fans whose teams won ate less food and saturated fat the following day. The scientists found similar results when they looked at the dietary patterns of French soccer fans.

e) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

f) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

So far, the evidence suggests that stress in one's life might lead people to eat more of types of foods that are not good for us. Here's a final study that was designed to test a way to prevent stress from affacting our eating habits. We'll call it Study D:

In a study published last year, [researcher Janet] Tomiyama and her colleagues recruited 100 adults with elevated stress levels and split them into two groups. Everyone was trained to do a daily, six-minute stress reduction exercise called progressive muscle relaxation, which involves tensing and relaxing your muscles from toes to head. You can find an example of it here. This deep relaxation technique has been shown in studies to reduce stress and anxiety.

But members of one group were assigned to eat a serving of fresh fruit such as sliced pineapple, honeydew and pears, about five minutes into each of their daily progressive muscle relaxation sessions. After one week of this, the researchers found that eating just the fruit alone made the participants feel less stressed and put them in a better mood. By pairing the fruit with a relaxation exercise, their brains began to view the fruit as something that reduced their stress levels — essentially turning the fruit into comfort food.

g) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

h) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

i) Bonus question: Study D included an element of classical conditioning, which you probably learned about in Introductory Psychology. Can you identify the conditioned stimulus and conditioned response in this example? 

j) Rank the four studies (A, B, C, and D, above) in terms of which ones you believe have the strongest evidence (based on their methodology).