Personality changes may be another effect of pandemic

Whether it was attending school lectures, making memorable first impressions at that first office job, or packing the floor at a concert, many of the social rituals that had been rites of passage for young people were disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

That has left people such as Thuan Phung, a junior at the Parsons School of Design who lives in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, feeling “weird” about real-life interactions. After two years of virtual instruction, he is back in the classroom.

“On Zoom you can mute,” Phung, 25, said. “It took me a while to know how to talk to people.”

Now, a recent study of people’s personalities suggests that the discomfort he’s feeling is not uncommon for people in his generation, who were forced into the isolation of pandemic restrictions in their 20s, a time of social anxiety for many of them.

COVID has not only reshaped the way we work and connect with others, but has also redrawn the way we are, according to the study, which found some of the most pronounced effects among young adults.

Key personality traits may have dimmed so that people have become less extroverted and creative, not as agreeable, and less conscientious, according to the study, published last month in the journal PLOS ONE.

Those declines amounted to “about one decade of normative personality change,” the study said. People under 30 exhibited “disrupted maturity.” That change is the opposite of how a young adult’s personality normally develops over time, the study’s authors wrote.

“If these changes are enduring, this evidence suggests population-wide stressful events can slightly bend the trajectory of personality, especially in younger adults,” the study said.

The authors of the personality study relied on data from the Understanding America Study, an ongoing Internet panel at the University of Southern California that first began collecting survey answers in 2014, drawing upon publicly available data from about 7,000 participants who responded to a personality assessment administered before and during the pandemic.

Angelina Sutin, the paper’s lead author and a professor at Florida State University, said the study results showed that on average, personality was altered during the pandemic, though she emphasized that the findings captured “one snapshot in time” and could be temporary.

“Personality tends to be pretty resistant to change. It might take something like a global pandemic,” Sutin said. “But it is hard to pinpoint exactly what it was about the pandemic that led to these changes.”

Sutin and her coauthors also don’t know if those personality changes will persist.

The researchers analyzed five dimensions of personality: neuroticism, one’s tolerance of stress and negative emotions; openness, defined as unconventionality and creativity; extroversion, or how outgoing a person is; agreeableness, or being “trusting and straightforward”; and conscientiousness, how responsible and organized a person is.

Perhaps echoing the changes, interest in psychotherapy soared throughout the pandemic, several therapists said. Virtual therapy has also boomed.

At Talkspace, a platform that offers therapy online, the number of individual active users rose 60 percent from March 2020 to a year later, said John Kim, a spokesperson for the company.

Therapists practicing in the United States say they have observed their clients struggling with navigating the confines of pandemic living and dealing with the vicissitudes of social norms.

Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist based in Charlotte, N.C., with a private practice and an Instagram following of more than 1 million, said that she noticed escalating discomfort as people slowly reintegrated into

‘We have grown so accustomed to isolating that we now think we love it. But is that really who you are?’

NEDRA GLOVER TAWWAB, a therapist based in Charlotte, N.C.

past routines, such as working in an office.

“We have grown so accustomed to isolating that we now think we love it,” Glover Tawwab said. “But is that really who you are? Or is that what you had to accept during that time?”

How long the changes of the pandemic period will last remains an open question, the study’s authors said.

Therapists including Glover Tawwab said the transition period into in-person life after the worst of the crisis could present an opportunity to reintegrate slowly and to reconnect with people and experiences more intentionally.

“This is a wonderful time to really observe what things you miss, and what things you enjoy being away from,” she said. “So we have this time now to create what we really want.”