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

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.