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

为了应对COVID-19，美国各地的人们在日常与他人接触的水平上经历了极端和突然的变化，迫使许多人进入社交孤立状态。这个项目研究了社会孤立的经历是否会放大人类有害和持续恐惧的发展。这项研究进一步测试了社交孤立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境事件（由于COVID-19导致的社会隔离），这在实验室中无法复制，以提供罕见的洞察力，了解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。这项研究将有助于越来越多地了解社会孤立对增加恐惧和影响创伤发展过程的影响;它也可能提供简单的策略来减轻这些影响。研究表明，社会孤立可能会影响长期创伤，直接影响恐惧学习过程。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，也更有可能在创伤后出现PTSD样症状。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孤立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更差的恐惧消退，尽管当个体在恐惧消退期间被提醒他们的社会支持时，这些影响可能会被消除。该项目将通过对美国各地居住在某种形式的“呆在家里”秩序的地方的人进行抽样来评估这些假设。该研究考察了COVID-19带来的极端情境社会隔离是否会导致中性图像与负面情感刺激配对的恐惧关联的增加。该研究还研究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积极的事情，以促进联系感，改善恐惧消退，并减少那些最严重孤立的恐惧协会的发展。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，以减少这种创伤，可以立即使用，并在未来减轻有害的副作用，必要的措施，以应对新冠肺炎-该奖项反映了NSF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进行评估，被认为值得支持的搜索.

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.