Abstract
The restriction imposed worldwide for limiting the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) globally impacted our lives, decreasing people’s wellbeing, causing increased anxiety, depression, and stress and affecting cognitive functions, such as memory. Recent studies reported decreased working memory (WM) and prospective memory (PM), which are pivotal for the ability to plan and perform future activities. Although the number of studies documenting the COVID-19 effects has recently blossomed, most of them employed self-reported questionnaires as the assessment method. The main aim of our study was to use standardized tests to evaluate WM and PM in a population of young students. A sample of 150 female psychology students was recruited online for the administration of two self-reported questionnaires that investigated psychological wellbeing (DASS-21), prospective, and retrospective memory (PRMQ). Subjects were also administered two standardized tests for WM (PASAT) and PM (MIST). We found increased anxiety, depression, and stress and decreased PM as measured by self-reports. The perceived memory failures agreed with the results from the standardized tests, which demonstrated a decrease in both WM and PM. Thus, COVID-19 restriction has strongly impacted on students’ mental health and memory abilities, leaving an urgent need for psychological and cognitive recovery plans.
Highlights
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has become a global epidemic, posing a serious threat to public health throughout the world [1,2]
The comparison of the mean score obtained at the COVID-19 confinement (T1) for each domain of the DASS-21 to normative data confirmed an increased level of anxiety, depression, and stress, which reached the level of “severe” (Table 1)
The Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed a significant increase in the mean percentage of responses for both the prospective (T0: mean = 41.4, SD = 6.9; T1: mean = 51.6, SD = 6.8; Z = −9.96; p < 0.001) and the retrospective memory (T0: mean = 43.5, SD = 4.8; T1: mean = 52.4, SD = 7.4; Z = −10.02; p < 0.001) (Figure 2), which suggests an overall increase in the participants’ self-reported failures in their memory abilities during the confinement
Summary
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has become a global epidemic, posing a serious threat to public health throughout the world [1,2]. The negative impact on mental health has been documented by a growing number of studies showing higher levels of anxiety, depression, and stress during the pandemic compared to the pre-COVID-19 emergency [7,8,9]. The authors showed that young people aged between 21 and 40 years were more psychologically vulnerable, with higher levels of anxiety and depression and a lower mental wellbeing compared to the pre-COVID-19 pandemic. Another cross-sectional and nationwide survey of college students in China confirmed these results, revealing the prevalence of acute stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 emergency [15]. The authors have identified gender—with females being more affected—precariousness, social isolation, and low quality of social relations
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