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Children and COVID-19 Research Library

UNICEF Innocenti's curated library of COVID-19 + Children research

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1 - 15 of 31
Latent profiles of adolescents' relationships with parents and siblings: Associations with emotional and behavioral responses during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Yingying Tang; Yingmiao Shao; Ting He (et al.)

Published: December 2022   Journal: Current Psychology
The purpose of this study is to identify the latent profiles of Chinese adolescents’ family (parent–adolescent and sibling) relationships prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as associations between those profiles and adolescents’ emotional and behavioral responses. A total of 2,305 adolescents from China aged between 10 and 18 years completed measures of parent–adolescent relationships, sibling relationships, and emotional and behavioral responses during the pandemic.
The experiences of parents and Ccildren during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Tiziana Schirone; Isabella Quadrelli

Published: November 2022   Journal: Prima Educatione

The study, which included a total of 1,122 Italian parents (96.5% female; 3.5% male) of children with an average age of 7.56 years (N = 1,461, SD = 2.03), explores how parents with children (5–11 years old) represent changes in their daily habits as well as their own and children’s experiences in relation to the impact caused by the health emergency. The study also investigates how work, family life, contextual factors and media exposure associated with information regarding COVID-19 have contributed to influencing emotional states and behavioural patterns. The research programme was carried out by an online questionnaire in June 2020. The pandemic was experienced in a variety of ways across four clusters. The highest levels of discomfort can be observed among those parents who have experienced isolation and the fear of contagion with higher levels of anxiety, which have been intensified by the perception of change and the deterioration in working conditions. Parents with higher emotional instability have found a low emotional stability and high depressive tones in their children.


Gender and age association with physical activity and mood states of children and adolescents in social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Junliang He; Longkun Qiu

Published: November 2022   Journal: Sustainability
The outbreak of COVID-19 had a huge impact on daily life. It greatly reduced our physical activity (PA) and caused an increase in negative emotions. The emotions of different ages and sexes were impacted during the pandemic but the most severely influenced were adolescents. Therefore, the study’s main purpose was to explore the influence of age and gender on adolescent physical activity and emotions during the pandemic. The subjects of the present study were 14,045 adolescents aged 10–18 years from the Yan’an Shaanxi province. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form (IPAQ-SF) was used to investigate the PA and Profile of Mood States (POMS) was used to investigate adolescents’ mood states. Results: we found that girls and boys have significant differences in total PA and moderate PA (p < 0.01). The adolescents’ PA levels of different ages had significant differences (p < 0.01). Meanwhile, boys had higher negative emotion scores (anger, fatigue, depression, confusion) than girls. Girls, in contrast, had higher positive emotion scores (self-esteem, vigor) (p < 0.01). With increasing age, the increase in emotional states seems to diminish (p < 0.01).
Face masks and emotion literacy in preschool children: implications during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Keri Giordano; Carleigh S. Palmieri; Richard LaTourette (et al.)

Published: November 2022   Journal: Early Childhood Education Journal
With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, safety regulations, such as face mask wearing, have become ubiquitous. Due to such regulations, many children’s interpersonal interactions occurring outside of the home now involve face coverings. The present study examined young children’s ability to identify emotions in an adult model wearing a face mask. Children (n = 77) between the ages of 3 and 5 were shown 16 different graphics of a model expressing four common emotions (happy, sad, angry, scared) across four conditions: still unmasked photo, still masked photo, masked video verbally implying the emotion, masked video verbally explicitly stating the emotion.
The effect of face mask wearing on language processing and emotion recognition in young children

AUTHOR(S)
Lorna Bourke; Jamie Lingwood; Tom Gallagher-Mitchell (et al.)

Published: November 2022   Journal: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Face mask wearing was an important preventative strategy for the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. However, the effects that occluding the mouth and nose area with surgical masks could have on young children’s language processing and emotion recognition skills have received little investigation. To evaluate the possible effects, the current study recruited a sample of 74 children from the North West of England (aged 4–8 years). They completed two computer-based tasks with adults wearing or not wearing surgical face masks to assess (a) language processing skills and (b) emotion recognition ability. To control for individual differences, age, sex, receptive vocabulary, early reading skills, and parent-reported social–emotional competence were included in analyses.
Emotional and behavioral problems in adolescents in the context of COVID-19: a mixed method study

AUTHOR(S)
Carolina Ferreira Peterle; Caroline Lima Fonseca; Bruna Hinnah Borges Martins de Freitas (et al.)

Published: October 2022   Journal: Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem

This study aims to estimate the prevalence of emotional and behavioral problems in adolescents in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic e to explore adolescents’ perception of emotional and behavioral problems identified. It is a mixed-method explanatory sequential design. Participants were 479 adolescents aged 15 to 18 from a Brazilian Central-West region capital.

Exploring the role of COVID-19 pandemic-related changes in social interactions on preschoolers' emotion labeling

AUTHOR(S)
Stephanie Wermelinger; Lea Moersdorf; Simona Ammann (et al.)

Published: September 2022   Journal: Frontiers in Psychology
During the COVID-19 pandemic people were increasingly obliged to wear facial masks and to reduce the number of people they met in person. In this study, we asked how these changes in social interactions are associated with young children's emotional development, specifically their emotion recognition via the labeling of emotions. Preschoolers labeled emotional facial expressions of adults (Adult Faces Task) and children (Child Faces Task) in fully visible faces. In addition, we assessed children's COVID-19-related experiences (i.e., time spent with people wearing masks, number of contacts without masks) and recorded children's gaze behavior during emotion labeling. We compared different samples of preschoolers (4.00–5.75 years): The data for the no-COVID-19-experience sample were taken from studies conducted before the pandemic (Adult Faces Task: N = 40; Child Faces Task: N = 30). The data for the with-COVID-19-experience sample (N = 99) were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland between June and November 2021.
The COVID‐19 pandemic, mask‐wearing, and emotion recognition during late‐childhood

AUTHOR(S)
Maia Chester; Rista C. Plate; Tralucia Powell (et al.)

Published: August 2022   Journal: Social Development
Face masks are an effective and important tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including among children. However, occluding parts of the face can impact emotion recognition, which is fundamental to effective social interactions. Social distancing, stress, and changes to routines because of the pandemic have also altered the social landscape of children, with implications for social development. To better understand how social input and context impact emotion recognition, the current study investigated emotion recognition in children (7–12 years old, N = 131) using images of both masked and unmasked emotional faces.
Investigating children's ability to express internal states through narratives and drawings: two longitudinal studies during pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Giulia Vettori; Costanza Ruffini; Martina Andreini (et al.)

Published: August 2022   Journal: Children
The COVID-19 pandemic emergency has challenged children’s socio-affective and cognitive development. It is essential to capture the modulation of their emotional experience through ecological and children-friendly tasks, such as written narratives and drawings. This contribution investigates the impact of pandemic experience (2020–2021 waves) on the internal states and emotions of the primary school age children, according to a longitudinal research approach through narratives (study 1 n = 21) and drawing tasks (study 2 n = 117). 138 Italian children were examined during COVID-19 three (study 1) or two waves (study 2). Children’s written narratives were codified on the basis of narrative competence and psychological lexicon. Children’s drawings were codified based on social/emotional, physical, and environmental elements.
Ensuring emotional and psychological wellbeing in children through bibliotherapy during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Sophia Adeyeye; Opeyemi Oboh

Published: July 2022   Journal: International Journal of Librarianship
Sudden lifestyle changes and disruption necessitated by the COVID-19 precautionary measures resulted in children becoming frightened, bored, isolated and anxious which automatically posed a threat to their emotional and psychological wellbeing. These set of children could be helped through therapeutic reading of books. Reading stories provides children with opportunities to gain insight and learn healthier ways to face the uncertainty caused by their inability to do things that they normally do like going to school, visit friends, go to parties, visit parks, visit the library and so on. The study used a prestest - posttest quasi- experimental methodology which lasted for a duration of 10 weeks, the study population were twenty-five (25) within the age bracket of 7-16 years old.
The emotional lockdown: how social distancing and mask wearing influence mood and emotion recognition in adolescents and adults

AUTHOR(S)
Louisa Kulke; Theresia Langer; Christian Valuch

Published: June 2022   Journal: Frontiers in Psychology
During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. The current preregistered studies hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood in adults and in adolescents between 12 and 13 years of age, who are in a critical phase of social development. This study found that mood was positively related to face-to-face but not to virtual interactions in adults and that virtual interactions were associated with negative mood in adolescents. This suggests that contact restrictions leading to a decrease in face-to-face compared to virtual interactions may be related to negative mood. To understand if prolonged exposure to people wearing masks during the pandemic might be related to increased sensitivity for subtle visual cues to others’ emotions from the eye region of the face, this study also presented both age groups with the same standardized emotion recognition test.
Mental health and health-related quality of life in German adolescents after the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Justine Hussong; Eva Möhler; Anna Kühn (et al.)

Published: May 2022   Journal: Children
Evaluations after the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany showed an increase in mental health problems and a reduction in health-related quality of life (HRQoL). The aim of the study was to assess those aspects after the third wave of COVID-19 in adolescents who decided to receive a vaccination. In students aged 12–17 years recruited from schools in one German region, mental health (by the strengths and difficulties questionnaire, SDQ) and HRQoL (by KIDSCREEN-10) were assessed by both a self- and parental report. Data from 1412 adolescents (mean age 14.3 years, SD = 1.64) and 908 parents were collected. The mean self-reported HRQoL was T = 53.7 (SD = 11.2), significantly higher in boys than in girls and higher in younger (12–14 years) than in older (15–17 years) adolescents. In total, 18.7% of adolescents reported clinically relevant psychological symptoms, especially peer problems (23.5%), emotional problems (17.4%), and hyperactivity (17.1%). Comparing the present data to evaluations after the first and second waves of COVID-19, adolescents rated a higher HRQoL and reported less mental health problems after the third wave. After 1.5 years of living with the pandemic, adolescents have adapted to the changes in everyday life. Further, the relaxation of restrictions, better school organization, and the prospect of the vaccination may have increased optimism, wellbeing, and contentment, leading to declining but still alarming rates of psychological symptoms.
Associations of childhood neglect, difficulties in emotion regulation, and psychological distresses to COVID-19 pandemic: an intergenerational analysis

AUTHOR(S)
Yeqing Zhang; Nalan Zhan; Mengyuan Long (et al.)

Published: May 2022   Journal: Child abuse & neglect

Although individuals' psychological responses to trauma are varied, significant associations between parental and offspring's reactions have been documented among trauma-exposed families. Common susceptible factors originated from intergenerational transmission may be underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon. This study aimed to investigate the intergenerational transmission of depression and anxiety during early outbreak of COVID-19 and further examined whether the transmission of child neglect and difficulties in emotion regulation (ER) was associated with the transmission of psychological distresses.

Lifestyle and behavior of children during COVID-19

AUTHOR(S)
Kavitha Muthukumaran; Vani Haridasan

Published: April 2022   Journal: ECS Transactions
Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the term "change in children's lifestyle behavior" is currently a hot topic in society. Children's lifestyle behaviors may have been altered by home confinement during the epidemic, although evidence is still emerging and limited, which talks about SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being. The present study focuses on the important factors that lead to change in lifestyle of children, to examine the effects of COVID-19 confinement, and to suggest preventive measures. The design used for this study is descriptive and an online survey was conducted within Tamilnadu with a sample size of 105. Correlation, chi-square are the tools used for testing the variables.
Drawing the COVID-19 pandemic: how do children incorporate the health crisis and its consequences into their everyday thinking?

AUTHOR(S)
Nahia Idoiaga Mondragon; Amaia Eiguren Munitis; Naiara Berasategi Sancho (et al.)

Published: April 2022   Journal: Psychology & Health

The general objective of this research was to explore how children understand and represent COVID-19 health crisis in their everyday thinking.This research is based on a qualitative interpretive research methodology that uses 6-12 years children’s drawings from San Sebastian (Basque Country, northern of Spain) to collect data. This technique allows children to visualize how they face this situation through a tool that promotes expression of their feelings and representations.

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COVID-19 & Children: Rapid Research Response

UNICEF Innocenti is mobilizing a rapid research response in line with UNICEF’s global response to the COVID-19 crisis. The initiatives we’ve begun will provide the broad range of evidence needed to inform our work to scale up rapid assessment, develop urgent mitigating strategies in programming and advocacy, and preparation of interventions to respond to the medium and longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. The research projects cover a rapid review of evidence, education analysis, and social and economic policies.