The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is having a profound effect on all aspects of society, including mental health and physical health. We explore the psychological, social, and neuroscientific effects of COVID-19 and set out the immediate priorities and longer-term strategies for mental health science research. These priorities were informed by surveys of the public and an expert panel convened by the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the mental health research charity, MQ: Transforming Mental Health, in the first weeks of the pandemic in the UK in March, 2020. We urge UK research funding agencies to work with researchers, people with lived experience, and others to establish a high level coordination group to ensure that these research priorities are addressed, and to allow new ones to be identified over time. The need to maintain high-quality research standards is imperative. International collaboration and a global perspective will be beneficial. An immediate priority is collecting high-quality data on the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across the whole population and vulnerable groups, and on brain function, cognition, and mental health of patients with COVID-19. There is an urgent need for research to address how mental health consequences for vulnerable groups can be mitigated under pandemic conditions, and on the impact of repeated media consumption and health messaging around COVID-19. Discovery, evaluation, and refinement of mechanistically driven interventions to address the psychological, social, and neuroscientific aspects of the pandemic are required. Rising to this challenge will require integration across disciplines and sectors, and should be done together with people with lived experience. New funding will be required to meet these priorities, and it can be efficiently leveraged by the UK's world-leading infrastructure. This Position Paper provides a strategy that may be both adapted for, and integrated with, research efforts in other countries.

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More Americans now play video games than go to the movies (NPD Group, 2009). The meteoric rise in popularity of video games highlights the need for research approaches that can deepen our scientific understanding of video game engagement. This article advances a theory-based motivational model for examining and evaluating the ways by which video game engagement shapes psychological processes and influences well-being. Rooted in self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000;Ryan & Deci, 2000a), our approach suggests that both the appeal and well-being effects of video games are based in their potential to satisfy basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. We review recent empirical evidence applying this perspective to a number of topics including need satisfaction in games and short-term well-being, the motivational appeal of violent game content, motivational sources of postplay aggression, the antecedents and consequences of disordered patterns of game engagement, and the determinants and effects of immersion. Implications of this model for the future study of game motivation and the use of video games in interventions are discussed.Keywords: self-determination theory, motivation, video games Psychological research examining video games is presently undergoing a dramatic shift in focus. Until very recently, the preponderance of research in video games has been concern-focused, with studies aimed at identifying the potential negative effects of gaming. Specific foci of these research programs have included the relations between gaming and increased aggression, social isolation, and overuse (Anderson & Bushman, 2001;Grüsser, Thalemann, & Griffiths, 2007). Yet, more recently, a number of researchers have become intervention-focused, hoping to harness the magnetic motivational appeal of video games to help relieve pain and stress or customizing games for educational or health-related interventions (for a review, see Baranowski, Buday, Thompson, & Baranowski, 2008). Increasingly, intervention-focused researchers are demonstrating that games can positively influence both psychological and physical well-being.Although the goals of both concern-focused and interventionfocused research are dissimilar, both share a descriptive research approach: The methods and theories they employ evaluate the extent to which video games exert positive, negative, or no influence on specified outcomes under a given set of circumstances. What is less well understood and less widely studied are the mechanisms that underlie these positive and negative links.In this article, we outline a theory-based empirical model for understanding and evaluating the processes through which video games motivate sustained engagement, and how experiences with these games affect the psychological and physical well-being of players. Our approach is based on self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000;Ryan & Deci, 2000a), a macrotheory of human motivation that is principally concerned with the potential of social contexts to prov...

1The widespread use of digital technologies by young people has spurred speculation that their 2 regular use negatively impacts psychological well-being. Current empirical evidence 3 supporting this idea is largely based on secondary analyses of large-scale social datasets. 4 Though these datasets provide a valuable resource for highly powered investigations, their 5 many variables and observations are often explored with an analytic flexibility that marks small 6 effects as statistically significant, thereby leading to potential false positives and conflicting 7 results. Here we address these methodological challenges by applying Specification Curve 8 Analysis across three large-scale social datasets (ntot = 355,358) to rigorously examine 9 correlational evidence for digital technology affecting adolescents. The association we find 10 between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is negative but small, explaining at 11 most 0.4% of the variation in well-being. Taking the broader context of the data into account 12 suggests that these effects are too small to warrant policy change. 13 Re-Evaluating the Relation between Digital Technology Use and Adolescent Well-Being 1 2The idea that digital devices and the Internet have an enduring influence on how 3 humans develop, socialize, and thrive is a compelling one 1 . As the time young people spend 4 online has doubled in the past decade 2 , the debate about whether this shift negatively impacts 5 children and adolescents is becoming increasingly heated 3 . A number of professional and 6 governmental organizations have therefore called for more research into digital screen time 4,5 , 7 which has led to household panel surveys 6,7 and large-scale social datasets adding measures 8 of digital technology use to those already assessing psychological well-being 8 . Unfortunately, 9 findings derived from the cross-sectional analysis of these datasets are conflicting; in some 10 cases negative associations between digital technology use and well-being are found 9,10 , often 11 receiving much attention even when correlations are small. Yet other results are mixed 11 or 12 contest previously found negative effects when re-analysing identical data 12 . A high-quality 13 pre-registered analysis of UK adolescents found that moderate digital engagement does not 14 correlate with well-being, but very high levels of usage possibly has small negative 15 associations 13,14 . 16 There are at least three reasons why the inferences behavioural scientists draw from 17 large-scale datasets might produce divergent findings. First, these datasets are mostly 18 collected in collaboration with multidisciplinary research councils and are characterized by a 19 battery of items meant to be completed by postal survey, face-to-face or telephone interview 6-20 8 . Though research councils engage in public consultations 15 , the pre-tested or validated 21 scales common in clinical, social or personality psychology are often abbreviated or altered to 22 reduce participant burden 16...