Background: The health crisis caused by COVID-19 has led many countries to opt for social quarantine of the population. During this quarantine, communication systems have been characterized by disintermediation, the acceleration of digitization and an infodemic (excess and saturation of information). The following debate arises: Do the levels related to the psychotic phenotype and pseudoscientific beliefs related to the interpretation of information vary before and after social quarantine? Objectives: This research aims to examine the psychological effects of social quarantine on the psychotic phenotype and pseudoscientific beliefs-experiences of the general nonclinical population. The following hypothesis was posed: social quarantine alters the levels of magical thinking, pseudoscientific beliefs and anomalous perceptions due to quarantine. Methods: A pre-and posttest analysis design was applied based on the difference in means, and complementary Bayesian estimation was performed. A total of 174 Spanish subjects responded to different questionnaires that evaluated psychopathological risks based on psychotic phenotypes, pseudoscientific beliefs and experiences before and after quarantine. Results: Significant differences were obtained for the variables positive psychotic symptoms, depressive symptoms, and certain perceptual alterations (e.g., cenesthetic perceptions), and a significant increase in pseudoscientific beliefs was also observed. The perceptual disturbances that increased the most after quarantine were those related to derealization and depersonalization. However, paranoid perceptions showed the highest increase, doubling the initial standard deviation. These high increases could be related to the delimitation of physical space during social quarantine and distrust towards information communicated by the government to the population. Is it possible that social alarmism generated by the excess of information and pseudoscientific information has increased paranoid perceptual alterations? Conclusions: Measures taken after quarantine indicate that perceptual disturbances, subclinical psychotic symptoms and beliefs in the pseudoscience have increased. We discuss which elements of quarantine coincide with the social marginality theory and its clinical repercussions.

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Knowing and measuring the psychosocial reactions of people to the coronavirus crisis could be useful for predicting citizen responsibility and psychological well-being in the general population. In this research, we present the COVID Reaction Scales (COVID-RS), a new tool that can measure and quantify the psychopathological reactions of the population to the COVID-19 crisis. The sample consisted of 667 subjects. Explorative and confirmative factor analyses were applied to examine the validity and reliability of the COVID-RS. Five dimensions were extracted that predicted 35.08% of the variance of the psychopathological reactions: (1) disorganized behaviors, (2) avoidant behaviors, (3) maladaptive information consumption, (4) herd behaviors and (5) loneliness. The results indicated that social quarantine induces and increases psychopathological reactions. However, emotional loneliness is reduced for each person with whom the respective subject lives during the quarantine. Finally, we can conclude that the COVID-RS has satisfactory validity and reliability. Measuring dysfunctional reactions to COVID-19 can enable the prediction of citizen responsibility.

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