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1000
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Abstract/Summary
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BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 was associated with an immediate
increase in mental health problems in a significant percentage of the general population.
Therefore, it is crucial to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic – as a psychosocial
stressor – affected the aetiological processes of mental disorders. Previous research has
shown that stress potentiates associative (fear) learning and analogue symptoms of
posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that analogue PTSD symptoms can emerge in
response to associative learning.
OBJECTIVE: We investigated whether distress in response to the COVID-19 outbreak support
the development of intrusions and rumination after exposure to a non-COVID-19-related
analogue trauma. Moreover, we examined if these effects are mediated by the strength of
associative learning during analogue trauma.
METHOD:: 122 undergraduate university students participated in an online experiment between
March and July 2020. They completed questionnaires measuring distress and rumination
related to the COVID-19 outbreak. On a subsequent day, they went through an associative
learning task, in which neutral stimuli were paired with the appearance of a highly aversive
film clip. Subjective ratings were assessed as indicators of associative learning. On the next
day, participants documented film-related intrusions and rumination.
RESULTS: COVID-19-related distress but not rumination was associated with post-film intrusion
and rumination load. These effects were mediated by associative learning.
CONCLUSIONS: The current findings are in line with the assumptions that stress enhanced both
associative learning and PTSD symptoms. Specifically, they indicate that prolonged
psychosocial stress – like during the COVID-19 outbreak – is linked to individual differences
in memory processing of aversive events. Further confirmatory research is needed to
replicate these results.
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