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

为应对COVID-19，美国各地的人们与他人的日常接触水平发生了极端和突然的变化，迫使许多人陷入社会孤立状态。本项目研究社会孤立的经历是否会加剧人类有害和持久恐惧的发展。这项研究进一步测试了社交孤立是否会降低一旦学会就消除这些恐惧的能力。这项研究利用了一个独特的情境事件（COVID-19导致的社会隔离），这是无法在实验室中复制的，为社会隔离如何加剧恐惧的发展以及社会联系的经历是否可以逆转这些影响提供了罕见的见解。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进程的影响的理解；它也可能提供一些简单的策略来减轻这些影响。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。社会孤立的动物表现出恐惧反应的增加，即使威胁不再存在，也会持续存在，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，社会孤立的人患创伤后应激障碍的风险更大。然而，到目前为止，还没有研究直接研究极端社会隔离对人类恐惧学习的影响。初步数据表明，社会孤立感似乎会导致持续的恐惧和较差的恐惧消退，尽管这些影响可能会在个体在恐惧消退期间被提醒他们的社会支持时消除。这个项目将通过在美国各地对居住在某种形式的“待在家里”的地方的人们进行抽样来评估这些假设。该研究调查了COVID-19带来的极端情境社会隔离是否会导致对中性图像与负面情感刺激配对的恐惧关联的增加。该研究还考察了为期两周的社会联系干预，在此期间，个人将被要求为他人做一些积极的事情来促进联系感，是否能改善那些最严重孤立的人的恐惧消退，并减少恐惧联想的发展。这项工作的发现有可能揭示社会隔离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，以减少这种创伤，这些干预措施可以立即使用，也可以在未来使用，以减轻应对COVID-19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，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.