Symposia
Cognitive Science/ Cognitive Processes
Malvika Godara, Ph.D.
Max Planck Society
Berlin, Berlin, Germany
The COVID-19 pandemic created significant mental health challenges such as increased levels of depression and reduced resilience. Given the isolating nature of the pandemic, the need for brief psychological interventions that can be delivered remotely becomes evident. We investigated the efficacy of online socio-emotional and mindfulness-based interventions in reducing depression and increasing resilience. As negative cognitive biases have been shown to play a pivotal role in the onset and maintenance of stress-related psychopathology, we also explored whether changes in these biases mediate interventional effects. Employing a community sample, participants were randomly assigned to either a socio-emotional or a mindfulness training delivered through an app over a 10-week period, and compared to a retest control group. Attention and interpretation biases were assessed pre- and post-training using the mouse-contingent Scrambled Sentences Task. We observed a significant training-related reduction on the Beck Depression Inventory-II Scale after both socioemotional and mindfulness training. However, only socio-emotional training group showed a significant increase in Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale scores after training. This suggests that while both trainings might reduce depression vulnerability, only socio-emotional interventions might be key to boosting resilience. Changes in negative interpretation bias were significantly associated with changes in depression scores, but only marginally with changes in resilience. There was a significant intervention effect on pre-post reductions in negative interpretation bias. Reductions in negative interpretation bias significantly mediated interventional effect on reductions in depression, when controlling for baseline levels of depression. However, interpretation bias did not mediate interventional impact on increase in resilience. The present findings indicate that altering the degree of negative interpretation biases through online interventions might act as a buffer against developing increased levels of depression during exposure to long-term pandemic stressors. However, enhancing resilience in the face of disasters might require interventions with more socio-emotional components. Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed in the context of disaster preparedness as well as more general theories of resilience and vulnerability.