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Background: recent research has shown that insecure attachment, especially attachment anxiety, is associated with poor mental health outcomes, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other research suggests that insecure attachment may be linked to nonadherence to social distancing behaviours during the pandemic.Aims: the present study aims to examine the causal links between attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant), mental health outcomes (depression, anxiety, loneliness) and adherence to social distancing behaviours during the first several months of the UK lockdown (between April and August 2020).Materials & methods: we used a nationally representative UK sample (cross-sectional n = 1325; longitudinal n = 950). The data were analysed using state-of-the-art causal discovery and targeted learning algorithms to identify causal processes.Results: the results showed that insecure attachment styles were causally linked to poorer mental health outcomes, mediated by loneliness. Only attachment avoidance was causally linked to nonadherence to social distancing guidelines.Discussion: future interventions to improve mental health outcomes should focus on mitigating feelings of loneliness. Limitations include no access to pre-pandemic data and the use of categorical attachment measure.Conclusion: insecure attachment is a risk factor for poorer mental health outcomes.

The COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium Study (C19PRC Study) aims to assess and monitor the psychological and social impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the general population, using longitudinal surveys and mixed-methods studies in multiple countries.

When the first UK national lockdown was announced, large numbers of the population began purchasing non-perishable foods and hygiene items in quantities that exceeded their usual weekly shop. This so called ‘over-purchasing’ was featured in news outlets and led to total stockouts of items including canned food and toilet paper in several UK supermarkets. To understand the psychological characteristics that were associated with the tendency to panic buy, several studies have considered the psychological and demographic predictors of this behaviour (e.g., Bentall et al., 2021; Garbe et al., 2020). The former of these studies found that participants who reported having a higher income were more likely to engage in panic buying, as these individuals had greater means of stockpiling resources relative to members of the population with a lower income. Far from being an irrational strategy, for those with access to the means to hoard, this may be a rational behaviour to avoid resource scarcity and is observed in several animal species during periods of uncertainty (Anselme & Güntürkün, 2020; Dickins & Schalz, 2020). As the response of the virus has become increasingly protracted, the economic impacts of the pandemic have grown. Current estimates of the cost of the pandemic to the UK Government have been estimated at 317 billion pounds as of September 2020. In the private sector, this has led to the closing of a number of businesses either temporarily or permanently. As such, some members of the population have experienced a fall in income due to job loss or being placed on the Government’s furlough scheme. However, other groups in the population have experienced the opposite effect: with fewer leisure activities to spend their disposable income on, some individuals have reported increases in wealth due to the pandemic (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2020). As income predicted over purchasing during the first wave of the pandemic, the current study will examine how changes to income during the COVID-19 pandemic affect this behaviour. Specifically, we will examine whether those who experience a reduction to their income report a decline in over-purchasing, and whether those who experience an increase in their income report an increase in over purchasing behaviour. We also examine whether psychological variables contribute to longitudinal changes in over purchasing behaviour.

ESRC funded research investigating social comparison as a mediator of the link between attachment anxiety and jealousy. This research aims to further explore the relationship between attachment anxiety and jealousy, by investigating social comparison as a potential mediator. We aim to generalise findings linking social comparison processes with the experience of jealousy to the level of personality; examining a disposition to jealousy and social comparison orientation. Comparison orientation refers to the frequency with which individuals compare themselves to others. We here operationalise jealousy with the cognitive and emotional subscales of the Multidimensional Jealousy Scale; which measure the tendency to perceive threats to one’s romantic relationship and the severity of emotional reactions to potentially threatening relationship experiences, respectively. Finally, we will perform exploratory path analyses of the relationships between attachment anxiety, social comparison and self-esteem, to provide initial evidence of the best way to interpret correlational associations between these variables.

Zoos and aquariums have a large annual footfall; thus, potentially exposing millions of visitors to informed, targeted and accurate conservation education. A systematic evaluation of zoo conservation interventions could help to identify what is effective, when, and for whom. Therefore, the primary objective of the present review is to use meta-analysis to assess the size of the effect of visiting or engaging withs zoos/aquaria on visitor outcomes, such as beliefs about conservation (i.e., knowledge; intentions; attitudes) and behaviour (i.e., conservation actions).

It is known that crises, including public health emergencies, further compound gender‐based power dynamics and underlying inequalities in socio‐economic and health systems, thus exacerbating violence against women, particularly when quarantine is involved (Bellizzi et al., 2020). The current COVID-19 pandemic has been no different. UN Women argue that violence against women is a ‘shadow pandemic’ to the novel coronavirus. During the earlier COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK, it has been reported that rates of domestic violence increased due to mandatory social isolation imposed on citizens, which exposed many women to increased contact with their cohabiting perpetrator. Domestic abuse continues to affect victims in comparable ways but there is also evidence to suggest that those from minority backgrounds are disproportionately impacted by domestic abuse (Gill, 2009). BAME people have a unique set of needs and cultural background which shapes the way in which they experience and respond to abuse. However, the needs and challenges of survivors from the BAME communities, especially with respect to domestic abuse experiences during the pandemic, are understudied. The present study aims to address this gap by understanding how these intersecting identities of gender, race and ethnicity compound the experiences of abuse of women within ethnic minority communities. The objective is to explore the impact of the present lockdown on Black and minoritised women in the UK. To do so, we propose to collect data using an online survey. The purpose of the survey is to explore the beliefs, attitudes, experiences and reporting of domestic abuse faced by women from BAME communities along with understanding their mental health, resilience, feelings of safety, access to support and patterns of help seeking during the present lockdown. It is important to conduct this research to inform our understanding about the unique challenges faced by women from ethnic minorities in the country in order to provide better response frameworks in subsequent lockdown scenarios and improve pandemic preparedness with strengthened diversity and inclusion while mitigating effects of rising domestic abuse cases.

This study investigates how effective middle and high-school teachers in Indonesia are as informants in identifying mental health problems in adolescents (13-18 years old) identified by parents and students as at risk of experiencing mental health issues. We will compare the correlation between Indonesian teachers’ reports with parental and self-report to corresponding correlations in a large-scale existing UK data set publicly available from the UK data archive.

ESRC funded research investigating attachment anxiety as a moderator of the self-esteem effect of social comparison

Additional file 1: Table S1. Standardised Factor Loadings for PHQ-GAD Confirmatory Factor Analysis for Each Country.

Additional file 2: Table S2. Shapiro-Wilk Normality Tests for PHQ and GAD-7 Scores for each Country

Objectives: The COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the adult population in multiple countries. This paper describes the third wave of the UK survey (the ‘parent’ strand of the Consortium) during July-August 2020. Methods: Adults (N=2025) who participated in the baseline and/or first follow-up surveys were reinvited to participate in this survey, which assessed: (1) COVID-19 related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours; (2) the occurrence of common mental disorders; as well as the role of (3) psychological factors and (4) social and political attitudes, in influencing the public’s response to the pandemic. Weights were calculated using a survey raking algorithm to ensure that the cross-sectional sample is nationally representative in terms of gender, age, and household income, and representative of the baseline sample characteristics for household composition, ethnicity, urbanicity and born/raised in UK. Results: 1166 adults (57.6% of baseline participants) provided full interviews at Wave 3. The raking procedure successfully re-balanced the cross-sectional sample to within 1% of population estimates across selected socio-demographic characteristics. Conclusion: This paper demonstrates the strength of the C19PRC Study data to facilitate and stimulate interdisciplinary research addressing important public health questions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The over-purchasing and hoarding of necessities is a common response to crises, especially in developed economies where there is normally an expectation of plentiful supply. This behaviour was observed internationally during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the absence of actual scarcity, this behaviour can be described as ‘panic buying’ and can lead to temporary shortages. However, there have been few psychological studies of this phenomenon. Here we propose a psychological model of over-purchasing informed by animal foraging theory and make predictions about variables that predict over-purchasing by either exacerbating or mitigating the anticipation of future scarcity. These variables include additional scarcity cues (e.g. loss of income), distress (e.g. depression), psychological factors that draw attention to these cues (e.g. neuroticism) or to reassuring messages (eg. analytical reasoning) or which facilitate over-purchasing (e.g. income). We tested our model in parallel nationally representative internet surveys of the adult general population conducted in the United Kingdom (UK: N = 2025) and the Republic of Ireland (RoI: N = 1041) 52 and 31 days after the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 were detected in the UK and RoI, respectively. About three quarters of participants reported minimal over-purchasing. There was more over-purchasing in RoI vs UK and in urban vs rural areas. When over-purchasing occurred, in both countries it was observed across a wide range of product categories and was accounted for by a single latent factor. It was positively predicted by household income, the presence of children at home, psychological distress (depression, death anxiety), threat sensitivity (right wing authoritarianism) and mistrust of others (paranoia). Analytic reasoning ability had an inhibitory effect. Predictor variables accounted for 36% and 34% of the variance in over-purchasing in the UK and RoI respectively. With some caveats, the data supported our model and points to strategies to mitigate over-purchasing in future crises.

COVID-19 continues to pose a threat to global public health. Multiple safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 are available with one-third of the global population now vaccinated. Achieving a sufficient level of vaccine coverage to suppress COVID-19 requires, in part, sufficient acceptance among the public. However, relatively high rates of hesitance and resistance to COVID-19 vaccination persists, threating public health efforts to achieve vaccine-induced population protection. In this study, we examined longitudinal changes in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, hesitance, and resistance in two nations (the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland) during the first nine months of the pandemic, and identified individual and psychological factors associated with consistent non-acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination. Using nationally representative, longitudinal data from the United Kingdom (UK; N = 2025) and Ireland (N = 1041), we found that (1) COVID-19 vaccine acceptance declined in the UK and remained unchanged in Ireland following the emergence of approved vaccines; (2) multiple subgroups existed reflecting people who were consistently willing to be vaccinated (‘Accepters’: 68% in the UK and 61% in Ireland), consistently unwilling to be vaccinated (‘Deniers’: 12% in the UK and 16% in Ireland), and who fluctuated over time (‘Moveable Middle’: 20% in the UK and 23% in Ireland); and (3) the ‘deniers’ and ‘moveable middle’ were distinguishable from the ‘accepters’ on a range of individual (e.g., younger, low income, living alone) and psychological (e.g., distrust of scientists and doctors, conspiracy mindedness) factors. The use of two high-income, Western European nations limits the generalizability of these findings. Nevertheless, understanding how receptibility to COVID-19 vaccination changes as the pandemic unfolds, and the factors that distinguish and characterise those that are hesitant and resistant to vaccination is helpful for public health efforts to achieve vaccine-induced population protection against COVID-19.