COVID Dynamic Project

The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophe that has caused societal upheaval globally. In the US, it triggered an economic shock and laid bare societal inequities. However, it also afforded a unique opportunity to elucidate the dynamics of psychosocial processes during extreme and volatile conditions. From April 2020 through January 2021, my colleagues and I conducted a within-participant longitudinal study (https://coviddynamic.caltech.edu) —in 16 waves—to capture the COVID-19 experiences of >1000 US residents, together with curated, external data to contextualize participants' responses. Each hour-long wave combined standard psychological assessments with surveys of emotion, social/political/moral attitudes, COVID-19-related behaviors, and tasks assessing implicit attitudes and social decision-making.

To provide a comparison between our COVID-DYNAMIC project and other COVID-related psychological studies, I led a team of 4 undergrad students to compile a comprehensive summary of several hundred COVID-related psychological studies and created an interactive visualization to help researchers identify and locate studies of interest.

I am working on several projects that focus on emotions experienced during the pandemic, including an investigation of the dimensions that best describe real life human emotion experiences, a characterization of emotions experienced during the pandemic at different time points and in different geographical regions, and understanding the effect of prolonged stressful, socially isolated conditions on experienced emotions.