Comparing Remembered and Imagined Collective Events Across Early and Late Phases of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Multinational Study
Tue-H11-Talk 5-4504
Presented by: Lynn Watson
This study investigates how the pandemic and related lockdown experiences influence memory and future forecasting of collective global and national events across 10 countries. The presentation will examine the themes and phenomenology of events reported across two time points (spring 2021) and (autumn 2022) during the pandemic with independent participant samples. The results demonstrate that while Covid-related events dominated past and future thinking during the early phase of the pandemic, the frequency of these events reduced substantially during the later phase of the pandemic. In line with ongoing global threats, increases were observed in the frequency of non-covid related political events across all conditions. Non-covid related events related to war were more frequent in the global event condition and non-covid related events focusing the environment were more frequent in the future event condition. Preliminary analyses also suggest that future events were rated as less negative than past events across both early and late phases of the pandemic. However, differences were observed in the valence of future events when comparing early and late pandemic phases. More specifically, events reported during the late phase of the pandemic were more negative compared to the early phase and this difference was strongest in the global event condition. Findings suggest that the phenomenology and themes of collective events reported at different times during the pandemic reflect ongoing changes in national and global socio-cultural contexts and will be discussed in relation to current models of collective event representation.
Keywords: Collective Memory, Future thinking, Pandemic, Thematic coding, National, Global