Whether
it was attending school lectures, making memorable first impressions at that
first office job, or packing the floor at a concert, many of the social rituals
that had been rites of passage for young people were disrupted by the
coronavirus pandemic.
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That has left people such as Thuan Phung, a junior
at the
Parsons School of Design in New York who lives in Hell’s Kitchen in
Manhattan, feeling “weird” about real-life interactions. After two years of
virtual instruction, he is back in the classroom.
“On Zoom you can mute,” Phung, 25, said. “It took me
a while to know how to talk to people.”
Now, a recent study of personalities suggests that
the discomfort he is feeling is not uncommon for people in his generation, who
were forced into the isolation of pandemic restrictions in their 20s, a time of
social anxiety for many.
COVID has not only reshaped the way we work and
connect with others, but has also redrawn the way we are, according to the
study, which found some of the most pronounced effects among young adults.
Our key personality traits may have dimmed so that
we have become less extroverted and creative, not as agreeable, and less
conscientious, according to the study, published last month in the journal PLOS
ONE.
These declines amounted to “about one decade of
normative personality change”, the study said. People under 30 years old
exhibited “disrupted maturity”. That change is the opposite of how a young
adult’s personality normally develops over time, the study’s authors wrote.
“If these changes are enduring, this evidence
suggests population-wide stressful events can slightly bend the trajectory of
personality, especially in younger adults,” the study said.
The authors of the personality study relied on data
from the Understanding America Study, an ongoing internet panel at the
University of Southern California that first began collecting survey answers in
2014, drawing upon publicly available data from about 7,000 participants who
responded to a personality assessment administered before and during the
pandemic.
Angelina Sutin, the
paper’s lead author and a professor at
Florida State University, said the study
results showed that on average, personality was altered during the pandemic,
though she emphasized that the findings captured “one snapshot in time” and
could be temporary.
“Personality tends to be pretty resistant to change.
It might take something like a global pandemic,” Sutin said. “But it is hard to
pinpoint exactly what it was about the pandemic that led to these changes.”
Sutin and her co-authors also do not know if those
personality changes will persist.
The researchers analyzed five dimensions of
personality: neuroticism, one’s tolerance of stress and negative emotions;
openness, defined as unconventionality and creativity; extroversion, or how
outgoing a person is; agreeableness, or being “trusting and straightforward”;
and conscientiousness, how responsible and organized a person is.
Gerald Clore, a professor emeritus of psychology at
the University of Virginia, said the authors were “appropriately cautious” in
their conclusions and on emphasizing the need for further study to reexamine
the findings.
The pandemic itself was a “hell of an experiment”,
said Clore, theorizing that it may have been the restructuring of routines
instead of overall stress that reshaped people’s personalities.
Perhaps echoing the changes, interest in
psychotherapy soared throughout the pandemic, several therapists said. Virtual
therapy has also boomed.
At Talkspace, a platform that offers therapy online,
the number of individual active users rose 60 percent from March 2020 to a year
later, said John Kim, a spokesperson for the company.
When your whole world goes into the virtual space, you lose that training ground for being able to be more conscientious.
The number of teens seeking therapy at
BetterHelp grew nearly fourfold since 2019, a spokesperson for the online therapy company
said.
Therapists practicing in the United States say they
have observed their clients struggling with navigating the confines of pandemic
living and dealing with the vicissitudes of social norms.
Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist based in Charlotte,
North Carolina, with a private practice and an Instagram following of more than
a million, said that she noticed escalating discomfort as people slowly
reintegrated into past routines, such as working in an office.
“We have grown so accustomed to isolating that we
now think we love it,” Glover Tawwab said. “But is that really who you are? Or
is that what you had to accept during that time?”
Some people have coped with the amplified stress,
exhaustion, and frustration of the period by finding a new outlet: screaming
outside with others. The trend has been attracting participants for more than a
year.
Sarah Harmon, a therapist in Boston, organized her
first primal scream event in March 2022 to let go of feelings that she said she
was exploding with.
“The pandemic didn’t give us anything; it didn’t
allow any of that deflating, any of that recharging,” Harmon said.
She said the proliferation and popularity of those
scream events underscored how people had unmet needs and few ways to process or
release pent-up feelings like rage.
Since April, Heather Dinn, of Zionsville, Indiana,
has been hosting monthly group screams on a local soccer field. She said the
scream was an opportunity for people who had bottled up frustrations to clear
an “overflowing” emotional load before they erupted.
“When we let it all get stuck in there, it just sits
there and it’s not going anywhere,” Dinn, a health and lifestyle coach, said.
Delta Hunter, a therapist in New York City who
facilitates a social-anxiety therapy group, said that the pandemic “compounded”
existing anxiety.
“People want to connect and process together, and we
weren’t able to do any of that,” Hunter said. “People felt really lost because
of that.”
Younger adults, and especially teens, have faced
greater restrictions on activities and experiences typical of adolescence and
youth, Sutin’s study concluded. It found that individuals under 30 exhibited
the sharpest drops in conscientiousness and agreeableness.
“When your whole world goes into the virtual space,
you lose that training ground for being able to be more conscientious,” Harmon
said, adding that she saw a lot of social anxiety in younger generations,
perhaps because they had not accumulated as many in-person experiences and
coping skills.
Several months ago, Anviksha Kalscheur’s practice in
Chicago established a teen support program to help young people address
feelings of disconnect and isolation.
The teenagers have expressed an overall negative
outlook toward the future and heightened social anxiety, she said. The therapists
picked up on a “little bit of a dark cloud” in their clients’ outlook when it
came to perceiving the uncertainty of the years ahead, Kalscheur said.
Connection, attachment, and interaction with others
are critical to developing personality, Kalscheur said, adding that identity
and personality are still being formed in younger teens.
“You’re at that stage of development, where they’re
not getting those cues, those attachments, those learning, like all those
different pieces that happen that you don’t even often think about,” she said.
“So of course, your environment has such a huge impact and in that particular
time frame.”
How long the changes of the pandemic period will
last remains an open question, the study’s authors said.
Therapists including Glover Tawwab said the
transition period into in-person life after the worst of the crisis could
present an opportunity to reintegrate slowly and to reconnect with people and
experiences more intentionally.
“This is a wonderful time to really observe what things
you miss, and what things you enjoy being away from,” she said. “So we have
this time now to create what we really want.”
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