Conversations that warm the heart: positive and negative links to the mental health challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Background: Public-health precautions to curb Covid-19 (e.g. lockdowns) threaten mental health and emotional wellbeing, especially for today's youngest adults. Their overuse of solitary, screen-mediated social media, plus underdeveloped in-person conversation skills, heighten their vulnerability to mental health problems such as loneliness, anxiety and depression. Methods: To explore interconnections among variables such as social media use, empathic skills for in-person conversation and strategies for coping with Covid-19 anxiety, Australian 18- to 26-year-olds took several novel in-depth questionnaire measures that were purpose-built for the present research. Results: Main findings were threefold: (i) Individuals who most frequently and wholeheartedly enjoyed live in-person conversations with friends suffered the most Covid-19 anxiety, worry and stress during periods of pandemic restriction. (ii) Empathic conversational skills were highest among those who conversed in-person (by phone or face-to-face) most often and were lowest for those who rarely did so and/or had little skill with in-person conversation. (iii) Those who gained the greatest relief from anxiety (e.g. about Covid-19) through solitary use of screen-based social media and games had the fewest empathic conversational skills. Conclusions: Implications of these findings for suggesting possible future interventions to help young people cope with public health measures such as lockdowns and to foster community health and wellbeing are discussed.