Abstract
The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has forced governments to impose a lockdown, and many people have suddenly found themselves having to reduce their social relations drastically. Given the exceptional nature of similar situations, only a few studies have investigated the negative psychological effects of forced social isolation and how they can be mitigated in a real context. In the present study, we investigated whether the amount of digital communication technology use for virtual meetings (i.e., voice and video calls, online board games and multiplayer video games, or watching movies in party mode) during the lockdown promoted the perception of social support, which in itself mitigated the psychological effects of the lockdown in Italy. Data were collected in March 2020 (N = 465), during the lockdown imposed to reduce the COVID-19 spread. The results indicated that the amount of digital technology use reduced feelings of loneliness, anger/irritability, and boredom and increased belongingness via the perception of social support. The present study supported the positive role of digital technologies in maintaining meaningful social relationships even during an extreme situation such as a lockdown. Implications such as the need to reduce the digital divide and possible consequences of the ongoing pandemic are discussed.
Highlights
A worldwide outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 (COVID-19) begun in December 2019
Separate multiple and simple regression models were tested considering the amount of technology use during the lockdown and social support as the predicting variables, whereas loneliness, boredom, anxiety, anger, irritability, and belongingness were entered as outcomes
Two influential data points emerged as common outliers in most of the tested models. They were excluded from all the subsequent analyses and all the analyses performed on a sample of N = 463
Summary
A worldwide outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 (COVID-19) begun in December 2019. At the beginning of April 2020, it caused more than 138,000 deaths and had infected 2 million individuals worldwide (World Health Organization, 2020a). As the number of infected people continued to rise, the Italian government enacted a decree on March 8, 2020 (OJ-N.59 of 8-3-2020), imposing a lockdown to the whole country, aimed at preventing the spread of the virus. The term lockdown refers to stringent containment measures, such as quarantine and social distancing, in order to slow down the spread of COVID19. At the beginning of April 2020, 165,000 Italians had been infected, and among these, 62,000 were in Lombardy (Opendata, 2020), one of the regions most affected by the infection
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