JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S youth faced major challenges to their emotional well-being and daily routines. Less well known are the patterns and persistence of those effects, especially over the pandemic’s multi-year course. Here, we analyzed smartphone-based biweekly affect surveys, using an abbreviated Positive and Negative Affect Survey (PANAS), and GPS location data collected from 887 Colorado-based twin youth over the course of six years, from 06/01/2016 – 04/18/2022. We observed mean declines in affect and mobility in the months following the pandemic onset, including a 29% decline in daily locations visited, a 60% decline in daily travel distance, and 0.3 SD changes in affect. Mean affect and mobility levels fluctuated considerably over subsequent years, with daily locations visited and positive affect remaining slightly below (standardized β=[0.10-0.20], P=[.008;.004]) and negative affect slightly above (standardized β=0.14, P=.04) pre-pandemic levels through April 2022. Weekly county-level COVID-19 transmission rates were negatively associated with mobility and positive affect and positively with negative affect, though these effects were greatly weakened later in the pandemic (e.g., early 2022) or when transmission rates were high (e.g., >200 new cases per 100,000 people per week). Findings demonstrated modest to large pandemic-onset and local case count effects on affect and mobility that attenuated with time but did not revert to pre-pandemic levels. Results highlight both youth resilience and ongoing challenges in the pandemic’s aftermath, and inform theories of hedonic adaptation which predict a return to an emotional baseline following stressful life events.