An interview
We recently talked with Damaris Aschwanden, about her paper titled, “Psychological and Behavioural Responses to Coronavirus Disease 2019: The Role of Personality”, which is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of EJP. Damaris is a post-doc at Florida State University in the United States.
Read on to learn more about the work of Damaris on the role of personality in responses to Corona below!
Q: Hello Damaris! Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what made you become interested in studying personality psychology?
I have been a postdoc since October 2018 at Florida State University (FSU) here in Tallahassee, and my research mainly focuses on the relations between personality, health, and dementia. I am Swiss though, and I did my undergrad, my master’s, and my PhD at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. I came to personality psychology because I was working as a student research assistant in different cognitive aging studies during my master’s. One day, the professor I was working for – Prof. Mike Martin – asked me whether I would be interested in doing a PhD revolving around personality, cognitive health, and aging. I have always been fascinated by the question of why some older individuals are able to maintain or improve their cognitive function in older age, whereas others don’t, and so I thought that it sounded interesting and made sense that personality predicts such differences.
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
I like being in nature and doing sports, because it really helps me to detach from work and relax. Back in Switzerland, I used to play floorball for more than 15 years in a sports team. I loved to go hiking, skiing, and snowboarding. This is all a bit difficult in Florida now, so here I like to go running, swimming or kayaking, and I play field hockey in FSU’s field hockey club team. Besides that, I also like reading books, which is something that I started to do more now because of the coronavirus situation. I also like listening to podcasts and meeting with friends for a coffee.
Q: Can you tell us what your study is about?
In mid-March, when the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic, we had a lab meeting in which we brainstormed about doing a research project on the COVID-19 virus. I thought it could be interesting, or even just helpful, to have a basic descriptive study to learn whether personality predicts people’s behavior during the pandemic. We were lucky that my advisors, Profs. Antonio Terracciano and Angelina Sutin, had launched an online study with a stratified sample on the psychological correlates of well-being and health in January/ February, which means that we had a personality assessment before Americans were aware of the spread of coronavirus here in the United States. This offered us the possibility of having a somewhat prospective, rather than purely cross-sectional, study design.
We had to be a bit creative with the design of the follow-up study. The original study of January/February was a research project on psychological correlates of well-being and health in general. We thus had to decide what to keep from the previous questionnaire, but we also had to make sure that we could include all our COVID-specific questions. We came together to brainstorm about what was already there in the literature and what we already knew from previous crises research. However, this was very difficult, so we came up with our own questions. Every person in the research group gave his or her input for the questionnaire. Those were three intensive days! However, as a result, there are also other papers from our research group on the COVID-19 virus; some focused on loneliness, others on personality change, for example.
In our study, we investigated whether the Five-Factor Model personality traits were associated with four behavioral or psychological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, that is (1) concerns related to the pandemic –for example, whether respondents were concerned of contracting the coronavirus–, (2) precautions taken to avoid catching the coronavirus –for example, whether participants washed their hands–, (3) preparatory behaviors related to the pandemic –for instance, whether participants stocked up on toilet paper–, and (4) duration estimates of the consequences of the pandemic –that is, how long participants think it will last until society goes back to normal, for example.
The study was very extensive; we did a lot of exploratory and additional analyses. However, I think the main results are threefold: First, we found that people with higher neuroticism reported more concerns about the coronavirus situation. Second, people with higher conscientiousness took more precautions to avoid catching the coronavirus. And thirdly, people with higher neuroticism were more pessimistic about the duration estimate, whereas higher extraversion was associated with more optimistic duration estimates.
Interestingly, and in contrast to our hypotheses, higher neuroticism was associated with fewer precautions taken and unrelated to preparatory behaviors. I dug around in the literature and previous studies suggest that it might have to do with a maladaptive coping strategy. This means, people high on neuroticism do the opposite of what they should do for a healthy outcome. Studies on COVID-19 specifically are mixed; there are some studies that show higher neuroticism is related to more precautions, but the average correlation of the five studies that I found was negative. In other words, there seems to be some evidence that indeed, people with higher neuroticism engage in fewer precautions.
We also performed some moderation analyses with age, because we thought personality might be more strongly related with some of these behaviors in older adults, a group at high risk for complications of COVID-19. Overall, we found that personality was more predictive of certain responses among older adults. For example, we found that older people with higher conscientiousness engaged in more preparatory behaviors than middle-aged and young people with high conscientiousness. This might be because older people try to reduce going to stores to not put themselves at risk by seeing other people in the grocery store, so they buy more stuff at once.
Based on these findings, we suggest several potential implications in our article for each outcome. Here I will pick the one that I think is most interesting. I think it could be useful to identify individuals based on their personality and subsequently deliver personality-tailored messages during a pandemic in real time, for example on a smartphone. I really hope that more future studies will go in this direction and that it will not always be so hypothetical about what people could and should do.
We also found that people with higher neuroticism engaged in fewer precautions, which indicates that recommendations for precautions need to be modified to be effective for those individuals. I think it would be interesting to come up with innovative approaches of how we can adjust the recommendations so that also people high on neuroticism will engage in more precautions. There is some interesting literature on smoking and they find that people high on neuroticism might try to detach from threatening information. As such, if you put pictures of blackened lungs and feet with amputated toes on cigarette packages, this has the opposite effect for people high on neuroticism. Instead, we should try to reduce the threatening information – but how to do that in the current coronavirus pandemic is very difficult, because we also have to be realistic and provide accurate information about the risks.
Likewise, our results showed that people high in neuroticism and extraversion reported greater concerns that the disruption in daily activities caused by the coronavirus will make them lonely. This might be useful information for health care professionals who are interested in identifying individuals at risk for experiencing loneliness, since these individuals might benefit from inclusion in early interventions to promote social connectedness.
Finally, I think our study was able to show that the predictive power of personality in the general health literature also holds in a pandemic. This suggests that these effects are generalizable to other, more specific contexts. But as I said, now it would be nice to have more applicable research, because I think we have shown for a long time that personality has predictive power in the health context.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young researchers?
I came up with two ideas that I personally think are important. The first one would be to not hesitate or be shy to reach out to other researchers and collaborate. This can be helpful in many ways and that’s in fact how I found my current postdoc position. During my PhD, my former PhD advisor, Prof. Mathias Allemand, encouraged me to organize a symposium for a conference. At the beginning I didn’t know who to ask because he said that I couldn’t ask only people from the University of Zurich. I knew this one paper of Prof. Martina Luchetti on personality and cognitive decline in Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences and I thought it would be awesome to have a symposium with her. Then I just asked her whether she is interested, and she was very nice in responding and wanted to Skype about my idea. We started to collaborate and published a paper during my PhD. By the time I was about to decide where to do my post-doc, she recommended that I apply for a position in the Terracciano/Sutin lab, which I eventually did, and we now work in the same research group. I don’t know what would have happened if I never would have reached out to her.
Another advice which I think we sometimes forget in academia – because it is very hard with all the pressure, especially as a PhD but also later on – is to disconnect regularly from work. In my experience, if you get too much into work, you lose the perspective and you don’t see the forest for the trees. I have learned that the best ideas do not always come at the desk, but rather while going for a run or talking to friends who are not in my research field. Taking breaks helps me to pull back and see the overall picture of what I am currently working on.
Q: Who is your favorite young scholar?
This is a difficult question and I am afraid I cannot give you specific name. I think many people around me inspire me one way or the other, even if it is only in small things. For example, I admire some people for how easily and nicely they write or for how they organize themselves or for how relaxed they always seem or for how they present their research and give great talks. I try to learn from all of them.