COVID-19 pandemic increased people's feelings of paranoia

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-07-29 12:27

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Cory Doctorow, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The COVID pandemic may have had another unwanted side effect - making us more paranoid, according to US research. The study found that the COVID-19 pandemic increased people's feelings of paranoia, particularly in states where wearing masks was mandated. The increase in paranoia was less pronounced in states that enforced a more proactive lockdown. Increased feelings of paranoia were also linked with greater acceptance of conspiracy theories, such as QAnon. The authors say that this shows that real-world uncertainty increases paranoia.

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conference: Nature Human Behaviour

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Organisation/s: Yale University, USA

Funder: This work was supported by the Yale University Department of Psychiatry, the Connecticut Mental Health Center and Connecticut State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. It was funded by an International Mental Health Research Organization/Janssen Rising Star Translational Research Award, an Interacting Minds Center (Aarhus) Pilot Project Award, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant no. R01MH12887 (P.R.C.), NIMH grant no. R21MH120799-01 (P.R.C. and S.M.G.) and an Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond Starting Grant (C.D.M.). E.J.R. was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medical Scientist Training Program training grant no. GM007205, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Neurobiology of Cortical Systems grant no. T32 NS007224 and a Gustavus and Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation Fellowship. S.U. received funding from an NIH T32 fellowship (no. MH065214). S.M.G. and J.R.T. were supported by a National Institute on Drug Abuse grant no. DA DA041480.

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