RAPID: Social isolation during COVID-19: Effects on fear learning and implications for trauma

作为对新冠肺炎的回应，美国各地的人们在日常与他人的接触中经历了极端而突然的变化，迫使许多人陷入社会孤立状态。这个项目调查了社会孤立的经历是否放大了人类中有害和持久的恐惧的发展。这项研究进一步测试，一旦学会社交隔离，是否会降低消除这些恐惧的能力。这项研究利用了一个独特的情景事件(由于新冠肺炎而导致的社会孤立)，这是实验室无法复制的，它为社会孤立如何加剧恐惧的发展提供了难得的洞察，以及社会联系的经历是否可以逆转这些影响。这项研究将有助于加深对社会孤立对增加恐惧和影响创伤发展过程的影响的理解；它还可能提供缓解这些影响的简单策略。研究表明，社会孤立可能通过直接影响恐惧学习过程来影响长期创伤。与世隔绝的动物表现出即使在不再存在威胁的情况下也会持续的恐惧反应增加，更有可能在创伤后出现类似创伤后应激障碍的症状。同样，研究表明，与世隔绝的人患创伤后应激障碍的风险更大。然而，到目前为止，还没有工作直接研究极端的社会孤立对人类恐惧学习的影响。初步数据表明，感到社交孤立似乎会导致持续的恐惧和更糟糕的恐惧消退，尽管当提醒个人在恐惧消退时他们的社会支持时，这些影响可能会被消除。该项目将对这些假设进行评估，从全美各地抽样调查那些实行某种形式的居家服务的地区的居民。这项研究考察了新冠肺炎带来的极端情境性社交隔离是否会导致人们对中性图像与负面情感刺激的恐惧联想增加。这项研究还调查了为期两周的社交干预，在此期间，个人将被要求为他人做积极的事情，以增进联系的感觉，这是否会改善那些最严重孤立的人的恐惧消退和减少恐惧联想的发展。这项工作的发现有可能揭示社会孤立如何影响创伤的过程，并揭示简单、低成本和可获得的干预措施来减少这种创伤，这些干预措施可以立即使用，在未来也可以用来缓解应对新冠肺炎和类似事件的必要措施的有害副作用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In response to COVID-19, people across the United States have experienced extreme and abrupt shifts in their level of daily contact with others, forcing many people into a state of social isolation. This project examines whether the experience of social isolation amplifies the development of harmful and persistent fears in humans. The research further tests if social isolation reduces the ability to eliminate those fears once learned. This study utilizes a unique situational event (social isolation due to COVID-19), which cannot be replicated in the laboratory, to provide rare insight into how social isolation heightens the development of fear and if experiences of social connection can reverse these effects. This research will contribute to the growing understanding of the effects of social isolation on increasing fears and influencing the developmental course of trauma; it may also provide simple strategies to mitigate those effects.Research suggests that social isolation may influence long-term trauma by directly influencing fear learning processes. Socially isolated animals exhibit increases in fear responses that persist even when a threat is no longer present, are more likely to develop PTSD-like symptoms following trauma. Similarly, research suggests that socially isolated humans are at a greater risk of developing PTSD. To date, however, no work has directly examined the impact of extreme social isolation on fear learning in humans. Preliminary data suggests that feeling socially isolated appears to lead to persistent fears and poorer fear extinction, although these effects may be eliminated when individuals are reminded of their social support during fear extinction. This project will evaluate these hypotheses by sampling people from across the U.S. living in places where some form of ‘Stay at Home’ order is in place. The research examines whether the extreme situational social isolation brought about by COVID-19 leads to increased development of fear associations for neutral images paired with negative affective stimuli. The study also examines whether a two-week social connection intervention, during which individuals will be asked to do positive things for others to promote feelings of connectedness, improves fear extinction and decreases the development of fear associations in those most severely isolated. The findings of this work have the potential to shed light on how social isolation influences the course of trauma and reveal simple, low-cost, and accessible interventions to reduce this trauma that can be used immediately and in the future to ease the harmful side effects of necessary measures to address COVID-19 and similar events.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.