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We conducted a rapid review and quantitative summary of meta-analyses that have examined interventions which can be used by individuals during quarantine and social distancing to manage anxiety, depression, stress and subjective well-being. A literature search yielded 34 meta-analyses (total number of studies k = 1,390, n = 145,744) that were summarized. Overall, self-guided interventions showed small to medium effects in comparison to control groups demonstrating their effectiveness. In particular, therapeutic approaches (including cognitive-behavioral, mindfulness, and acceptance-based interventions), selected positive psychology interventions, and multi-component and activity based interventions (music, physical exercise) showed promising evidence for effectiveness. Many of these interventions are available in online or smartphone app form. At the same time, self-guided interventions on average did not show the same degree of effectiveness as traditional guided individual or group therapies. The review points to activities and practices that can be adapted by individuals as a first step to manage their mental health during social distancing and quarantines. Further research is clearly needed on activities helping individuals to interact and live in constrained living conditions (e.g, improving social interactions during quarantine) and the relative effectiveness of self-guided interventions across cultural boundaries.

Psychology has become less WEIRD in recent years, marking progress toward becoming a truly global psychology. However, this increase in cultural diversity is not matched by greater attention to cultural biases in research. A significant challenge in culture-comparative research in psychology is that any comparisons are open to possible item bias and non-invariance. Unfortunately, many psychologists are not aware of problems and their implications, and do not know how to best test for invariance in their data. We provide a general introduction to invariance testing and a tutorial of three major classes of techniques that can be easily implemented in the free software and statistical language R. Specifically, we describe (1) confirmatory and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, with extension to exploratory structural equation modeling, and multi-group alignment; (2) iterative hybrid logistic regression as well as (3) exploratory factor analysis and principal component analysis with Procrustes rotation. We pay specific attention to effect size measures of item biases and differential item function. Code in R is provided in the main text and online (see https://osf.io/agr5e/), and more extended code and a general introduction to R are available in the Supplementary Materials.

Research on self-determination theory and clinical models such as acceptance and commitment therapy has shown that behaving in line with our values is a key to maintaining healthy well-being. Combining work on values and experimental studies on moral hypocrisy and well-being, we experimentally tested how behaving incongruently with values affects well-being. We hypothesized that discrepancies between how one thinks one should have behaved and how one reported one did behave would be more detrimental to well-being when the behaviors were value-expressive and motivationally coherent compared to a control condition; greater perceived gaps between how participants feel they should have acted and how they report they did act would be associated with more negative well-being outcomes; the relationship between value manipulation and well-being would be mediated by perceived behavioral gap; and that personal values would interact with value manipulation to produce differential effects on well-being. One-hundred and fifty-eight first-year psychology students participated in an experiment designed to highlight discrepancies between how participants have behaved in accordance with a certain value and how they think they should have behaved, before reporting their well-being. As hypothesized, greater discrepancies between reported past behavior and how participants thought they should have behaved was associated with negative affect and decreased reports of positive well-being. We found no evidence for differential effects of manipulated value-expressive behaviors on well-being, or for our hypothesis that personal values and manipulated value-expressive behaviors interact. Nevertheless, value content mattered in terms of inducing perceived behavioral gaps. Our study suggests that perceived discrepancies between any value and reported past behavior can have a negative impact on some aspects of well-being. We discuss how the application of our methodology can be used in further studies to disentangle the value-behavior nexus.