Conversations that warm the heart: positive and negative links to the mental health challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Public-health precautions to curb Covid-19 (e.g. lockdowns) threaten mental health and emotional wellbeing, especially for today's youngest adults. Their overuse of solitary, screen-mediated social media, plus underdeveloped in-person conversation skills, heighten their vulnerability to mental health problems such as loneliness, anxiety and depression. To explore interconnections among variables such as social media use, empathic skills for in-person conversation and strategies for coping with Covid-19 anxiety, Australian 18- to 26-year-olds took several novel in-depth questionnaire measures that were purpose-built for the present research. Main findings were threefold: (i) Individuals who most frequently and wholeheartedly enjoyed live in-person conversations with friends suffered the most Covid-19 anxiety, worry and stress during periods of pandemic restriction. (ii) Empathic conversational skills were highest among those who conversed in-person (by phone or face-to-face) most often and were lowest for those who rarely did so and/or had little skill with in-person conversation. (iii) Those who gained the greatest relief from anxiety (e.g. about Covid-19) through solitary use of screen-based social media and games had the fewest empathic conversational skills. Implications of these findings for suggesting possible future interventions to help young people cope with public health measures such as lockdowns and to foster community health and wellbeing are discussed.