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Living through the COVID-19 pandemic has numerous psychological consequences, including increased threat, uncertainty and isolation. In a global longitudinal online study, we are investigating how these factors affect future thinking and mental health in individuals across the lifespan, and how these relationships change across the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, we are tracking the development of personal and collective narratives about the pandemic. Following an entry survey (S0) and survey 1 (S1) in May 2020, surveys are being run every 1-3 months to capture experience, mood and future thoughts through the various waves of the pandemic. In total, 12 surveys will be collected between May 2020 and May 2022. This open-ended preregistration describes overarching aims and questions motivating this research, general methods and procedures for recruitment (and characteristics of the S0 sample) and data collection, all tasks used and variables of interest. Due to the scope and size of this dataset, we will conduct a series of sub-studies that address more constrained research questions; for each sub-study, specific predictions, methods and analyses will be published in separate pre-registration plans in association with this project overview, enabling us to be more transparent about our knowledge of the data at the time of each set of analyses.

Overgeneral autobiographical thinking - including lower specificity of past and future events - is commonly observed in a range of psychopathologies, including depressive disorders (Dalgleish et al., 2007; Williams et al., 2007; Addis et al., 2016), both during episodes and in remission (e.g., Watkins & Teasdale, 2001), as well as subclinically (e.g., dysphoria; MacLeod & Cropley, 1995). The psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as increased threat, isolation, and uncertainty, all have the potential to influence both mood and future thinking, which prompted us to include measures of depressive symptoms and autobiographical specificity in our larger online project - Thinking Beyond COVID-19 (osf.io/zfs98). Although data collection in this 2-year longitudinal project is still ongoing (to be completed in May 2022), in this “sub-study” we plan to analyze data from the first two surveys (S0 and S1) collected early in the pandemic (May 2020). Although we have some knowledge of existing data via data cleaning and processing, as well as other analyses (as described in detail in this pre-registration), this plan is being pre-registered prior to linking depression data with autobiographical specificity data, and thus before any study-specific statistical analyses are conducted. The first objective of this sub-study is to investigate whether severity of current depressive symptoms, and/or a history of depression, is associated with reduced autobiographical specificity as measured using two tasks (Sentence Completion Task, Event Description Task) and two specificity scoring protocols (Autobiographical Thought Specificity and Autobiographical Interview scoring). We also examine whether the effect of depression on specificity is stronger for future relative to past autobiographical thinking, and whether effects at the detail level can be decoupled from effects at the event level. The second objective is to the valence, content and phenomenology of autobiographical responses in depression. To this end, we examine word counts (e.g., related to valence and specific content) using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count, as well as subjective ratings. Finally, because autobiographical responses are collected online, this study also provides an opportunity for conceptual replication of effects reported in previous in-person studies.