Impact of COVID-19 related lockdown on cognition and emotion: A pilot study

COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge in front of the world contributed mostly by social distancing and lockdown. Among several other effects this pandemic has wreaked havoc on the psychology and cognition of people across the globe. In this paper we attempted to find out the impact of lockdown and social isolation on the cognition and emotion of young healthy adults with high education (n=43) by means of a questionnaire sent through email. We found that more than 50% of the participants had some kind of emotional or cognitive (dysexecutive) symptoms, as calculated through emotional symptom index (ESI) and cognitive symptom index (CSI). The correlation between cognitive and emotional symptoms was also found to be moderately strong (0.59). Although it is a pilot study and larger samples are required to draw firm conclusion, the results argue in favor of a negative impact on the cognition and emotion of healthy educated young people caused by the COVID-19 related lockdown. It can be conjectured that, if taking an older sample with a lower education, emotional and cognitive changes would be more evident.