Together Apart: The Mitigating Role of Digital Communication Technologies on Negative Affect During the COVID-19 Outbreak in Italy
Alessandro Gabbiadini,Cristina Baldissarri,Federica Durante,Roberta Rosa Valtorta,Maria De Rosa,Marcello Gallucci +5 more
TLDR
In this paper, the authors investigated whether the amount of digital communication technology use for virtual meetings (i.e., voice and video calls, online board games and multiplayer video games, or watching movies in party mode) during the lockdown promoted the perception of social support, which in itself mitigated the psychological effects of the lockdown in Italy.Abstract:
The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has forced governments to impose a lockdown, and many people have suddenly found themselves having to reduce their social relations drastically. Given the exceptional nature of similar situations, only a few studies have investigated the negative psychological effects of forced social isolation and how they can be mitigated in a real context. In the present study, we investigated whether the amount of digital communication technology use for virtual meetings (i.e., voice and video calls, online board games and multiplayer video games, or watching movies in party mode) during the lockdown promoted the perception of social support, which in itself mitigated the psychological effects of the lockdown in Italy. Data were collected in March 2020 (N = 465), during the lockdown imposed to reduce the COVID-19 spread. The results indicated that the amount of digital technology use reduced feelings of loneliness, anger/irritability, and boredom and increased belongingness via the perception of social support. The present study supported the positive role of digital technologies in maintaining meaningful social relationships even during an extreme situation such as a lockdown. Implications such as the need to reduce the digital divide and possible consequences of the ongoing pandemic are discussed.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Social Support Measurement and Intervention: A Guide for Health and Social Scientists
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Forced Social Isolation and Mental Health: A Study on 1,006 Italians Under COVID-19 Lockdown
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the psychological repercussions of objective isolation in 1,006 Italians during the first lockdown in spring 2020 and found that the longer the isolation and the less adequate the physical space where people were isolated, the worse the mental health (e.g., depression).
Journal ArticleDOI
Impact of COVID-19 on the digital divide: a rapid review.
TL;DR: In this paper, a rapid review was conducted to identify how this digital divide was manifest during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight any areas which might be usefully addressed for the remainder of the pandemic and beyond.
Journal ArticleDOI
COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on social relationships and health.
Emily Long,Susan Patterson,K Maxwell,Carolyn Blake,Raquel Bosó Pérez,Ruth Lewis,Mark McCann,Julie Riddell,Kathryn Skivington,Rachel Wilson-Lowe,Kirstin R Mitchell +10 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine key aspects of social relationships that were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing explicitly on relational mechanisms of health and bringing together theory and emerging evidence on the effects of the CoVID-2019 pandemic to make recommendations for future public health policy and recovery.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Digital Divide in the Era of COVID-19: An Investigation into an Important Obstacle to the Access to the mHealth by the Citizen.
Daniele Giansanti,Giulia Veltro +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a probing methodology was developed to address the problems connected to the Digital Divide in a broad sense, capable of minimizing the bias of a purely electronic submission and evaluating its effectiveness and outcome.
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