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The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and attendant lockdown measures present serious threats to psychological well-being worldwide. Here, we examined the extent to which being outdoors (versus indoors), the experience of loneliness, and screen-time are associated with psychological well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic using an experiencing sampling method. In April 2020, Austrian adults (N = 286, age M = 31.0 years) completed a 21-day experience sampling phase in which they reported their psychological well-being, whether they were indoors or outdoors, and loneliness at three random time-points each day, as well as their daily screen-time. Results indicated that being outdoors was associated with higher psychological well-being, whereas greater loneliness and greater daily screen-time were associated with poorer well-being. Additionally, the impact of loneliness on well-being was weaker when participants were outdoors than indoors. Temporal changes in well-being, loneliness, and screen-time across the 21 days were small. These results have health policy implications for the promotion of population well-being during pandemics.

New technologies (e.g., smartphones) have made it easier to conduct Experience Sampling Method (ESM) studies and thereby collect longitudinal data in situ. However, limiting interruption burden (i.e., the strain of being pulled out of everyday life) remains a challenge, especially when assessments are frequent and/or must be made immediately after an event, such as when capturing the severity of clinical symptoms in everyday life. Here, we describe a wrist-worn microcomputer programmed with a Physical Analogue Scale (PAS) as a novel approach to ESM in everyday life. The PAS uses the position of a participant's forearm between flat and fully upright as a response scale like a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) uses continuous ratings on a horizontal line. We present data from two pilot studies (4-week field study and lab study) and data from a 2-week ESM study on social media ostracism (i.e., when one's social media message is ignored; N = 53 participants and 2,272 event- and time-based assessments) to demonstrate the feasibility of this novel approach for event- and time-based assessments, and highlight advantages of our approach. PAS angles were accurate and reliable, and VAS and PAS values were highly correlated. Furthermore, we replicated past research on cyber ostracism, by finding that being ignored resulted in significantly stronger feelings of being offended, which was more pronounced when ignored by a group compared to a single person. Furthermore, participants did not find it overly difficult to complete the assessments using the wearable and the PAS. We suggest that the PAS is a valid measurement procedure in order to assess fleeting and/or frequent micro-situations in everyday life. The source code and administration application are freely available.

BackgroundAn important event in many young people’s lives is moving out of the parental home. This event is often operationalized as the distance between parents and their children, i.e., parent-child proximity.MethodsThe present study (N = 1,451) analyzed correlates of parent-child proximity through the lens of human value theory (Schwartz, Advances in experimental social psychology, 1992). Besides a classical proximity measure (i.e., parent-child), we also calculated the distance between childhood and current place of residence (i.e., childhood-now), as well as parent-childhood proximity (distance between children’s childhood place of residence and the current place of residence of parents), which acts as a control group because this distance is most probably chosen by the parents.ResultsAs hypothesized, we found that participants valuing universalism and self-direction as important (i.e., associated with growth and anxiety-freedom) moved further away from the place where their parents live and the place where they grew up than participants valuing self-protection and anxiety-avoidance (e.g., tradition, security, conformity).ConclusionsThis study not only adds to research on psychological motivations to move, it endorses value theory as being a useful lens through which to analyze migration behavior.