When pandemic lockdowns began, researchers around the world were asking a lot of questions and collecting lots – and lots – of data. What was the impact of the pandemic on mental health, both short-term and long-term? Which communities experienced the most negative effects of the pandemic? How can we better support these communities, and the entirety of our society, when disaster strikes next?

In this episode, Dr. Amanda Zelechoski spoke with two researchers about their recent studies that start to answer many of these questions. You’ll hear from Dr. Lara Aknin, a psychologist and head of The Lancet’s COVID-19 Mental Health Task Force, and Dr. Simona Skripkauskaite, who works with the University of Oxford’s Co-SPACE study (COVID-19: Supporting Parents, Adolescents, and Children During Pandemics).

Additional Resources about the Uneven Effects of the Pandemic

The Pandemic Did Not Affect Mental Health the Way You Think by Lara Aknin, Jamil Zaki, and Elizabeth Dunn (The Atlantic)

The Lancet COVID-19 Commission on Mental Health and Wellbeing

Dr. Aknin's Helping and Happiness Lab - Simon Fraser University

Co-Space Study: Supporting Parents, Adolescents and Children during Epidemics

Meet Our Guests

Dr. Lara Aknin is a Distinguished Associate Professor of Psychology at Simon Fraser University, former Fellow with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and editor of the World Happiness Report.

She holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Aknin’s research focuses on the antecedents and consequences of happiness and prosocial behavior. Most of her work examines how generous behavior makes people feel.

Her research has been published in various academic journals, including Science, Nature Human Behaviour, the Lancet Public Health, as well as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and has been covered in international media outlets such as the CBC, CNN, the Atlantic, Maclean’s Magazine, Forbes, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Simona Skripkauskaite is a PostDoctoral Researcher at University of Oxford and works for Oxford’s Co-SPACE study (COVID-19: Supporting Parents, Adolescents and Children During Pandemics) and the OxWell Student Survey. Dr. Skripkauskaite also leads a project on ‘Learning from the trajectories of mental health challenges for children, young people and parents over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic’, which will compare how families have been affected by the pandemic in the UK and Japan.

Overall, Dr. Skripkauskaite’s research to date has aimed to identify developmental processes underlying successful functioning, but has ranged across child and adolescent mental health, emotion regulation, and parent-child relationships, as well as neurodiversity, visual attention, and perception.