The Effects of the Pandemic: Memory and Social Isolation

Two recent articles address impacts of the pandemic. In late December 2021, Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology and director of the Schacter Memory Lab at Harvard University, was interviewed by NBC news

The stress, social isolation, and disruption of routine activities outside the home are bad enough but people also report being more forgetful or absentminded. Schacter observes that stress negatively impacts retrieval of information. He notes that people may well experience “blocking” — knowing that information is there but you can’t retrieve it, one example of which is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Greater absentmindedness is also common.

Alison Holman, a stress researcher and professor at the University of California, Irvine, notes that people cope with stress differently, but there are strategies that may help, including finding ways to socialize even at a distance, spending more time in nature, and making sure that you have a true weekend, especially if you have been working from home.

These findings have implications both for psychologists and neuropsychologists who diagnose individuals and for therapists who treat clients. Diagnosis will need to be more cautious when the client reports high levels of stress and treatment may need to address memory as well as other presenting problems.

The second article, by Plangger, Unterrainer, Kreh, Gatterer, & Juen, B. (2022) published Psychological effects of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020 in GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry.

They begin by reminding us of the restrictions on social life imposed by the pandemic, adding that older individuals were defined as high risk with “drastic restrictions on their personal and social contacts, including the suspension of psychosocial therapies.” They examined the cognitive and emotional effects of social isolation on 49 participants who lived in nursing homes. Though the sample is small, because they had data before the social isolation imposed in 2020, their study provides empirical evidence for the “negative effects of social isolation of older people in nursing homes regarding cognitive performance, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and quality of life.”

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