Rationale: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has dramatically altered people's social lives due to social restriction measures taken to control the coronavirus spread. Early on, increased loneliness has been publicly discussed as a harmful psychological side effect of these measures. Due to the serious adverse health consequences of loneliness, it is essential to take these concerns seriously and investigate them systematically to allow for evidence-based decision making. Thus far, however, high-resolution empirical evidence of such harmful side effects is rare. Methods: The present preregistered large-scale daily diary study assessed daily loneliness in 4,844 German adults between March 16 and April 12, 2020. Results and conclusion: Daily loneliness slightly increased during the first two weeks since implementing the pandemic-related measures and slightly decreased thereafter. With increasing age, daily loneliness increased more strongly over the four weeks. Moreover, daily loneliness increased more strongly for parents compared to people without children. Thus, despite some increases in loneliness in some individuals, there was no linear increase in loneliness in response to the first pandemic-related measures in the present sample.

Personality traits are strongly related to affect, but the mechanisms accounting for this association remain mostly unclear. We test a new theoretical model that proposes that personality states, situation characteristics, and affective states mediate the relation between personality traits and trait affect. Data from an experience sampling study (N=206; 4,381 observations) indicate that personality traits are associated with personality states and experienced situation characteristics, personality states and experienced situation characteristics are associated with state affect, state affect is associated with trait affect, and that these variables indeed mediate the relation between personality traits and trait affect. These results emphasize the importance of daily experiences for trait-level variables and call for further research on the interplay between personality, behavior, situations, and affect.

To slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the German government released the “Corona-Warn-App”, a smartphone application that warns users if they have come into contact with other users tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Since using the “Corona-Warn-App” is health-relevant behavior, it is essential to understand who is (and who is not) using it and why. In N = 1,972 German adults, we found that non-users were on average older, female, healthier, in training, and had low general trust in others. The most frequently named reasons by non-users were privacy concerns, doubts about the effectiveness of the app, and lack of technical equipment.

The study design was preregistered at https://osf.io/kvf5g/. The preregistration of the present analyses, the data, and R scripts can be retrieved from https://osf.io/urqdw/?view_only=e97f3517abe8466fb5a1a9dcb430f908. We have no known conflict of interest to disclose. Data collection was funded by Pathways to Character Project (sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and the Arizona State University Foundation), Grant 60699 to Maike Luhmann.

Research on major life events and personality change often focuses on the occurrence of specific life events such as childbirth, unemployment, or divorce. However, this typical approach has three important limitations: (1) Life events are typically measured categorically, (2) it is often assumed that people experience and change from the same event in the same way, and (3) external ratings of life events have unknown levels of validity. To address these limitations, we examined how common life events are typically perceived, how much perceptions of life events vary within events, and how well external ratings of events correspond to subjective ratings from people who experienced the events. We analyzed ratings of nine psychologically relevant characteristics of 10 common major life events from three different types of raters ( N = 2,210). Each life event had a distinct subjectively rated profile that corresponded well to external ratings. Collectively, this study demonstrates that life events can be meaningfully described and differentiated with event characteristics. However, people’s individual perceptions of life events varied considerably even within events. Therefore, research on major life events and their associations with personality change should incorporate individual perceptions of the events to advance the understanding of these associations.