As the push to relax social and economic restrictions for combating the pandemic gain traction, we need to understand personal motives behind what many experts consider a and how to protect workers most at risk when communities do “go back to work.”

According to cell phone mobility data, . And this “quarantine fatigue” or “cabin fever” is evident in states that are relaxing their restrictions, as well as those still under stay-at-home orders.

What’s behind the trends? And what’s the cost to society?

Following are statements on these issues from ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers , an associate professor of psychology who specializes in decision-making; , a graduate student in clinical psychology who is also co-leading a regional social distancing study; and , assistant professor in the School of Public Health with expertise in worker exposure to disease.

Joslyn:

Seeing others out and about may give the impression that the likelihood of infection has abated, making a variety of activities seem less risky.

Government officials can try to persuade people to by emphasizing why it’s important to remain vigilant, and focusing on what is still safe to do. Although the risk may be reduced it is not absent altogether, if it begins to spread we might be back at square one.

Kuczynski:

When the motivation to return to normal is so strong, we might seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignore or downplay evidence that is disconfirming. When we see other states reopening, we may give that undue weight on what it means for our own personal safety and the safety of the public as a whole.

There is an incredible sense of loss right now, ranging from loss of our normal routines all the way to loss of loved ones. We habitually seek social connection and emotional support from others when faced with major stressors such as these, but the ability to seek connection has become extremely limited for so many of us. This has the potential to make us feel incredibly alone in a struggle that we are all facing together.

Most people are interacting with others much less frequently than usual, and loneliness can have its own set of deleterious consequences. Feelings of loneliness function to motivate us to seek connection with others in the same way that feelings of hunger motivate us to find food. In a normal world that is extremely healthy and adaptive behavior, but right now it is extremely dangerous.

Baker:

As we begin to think about reopening, workplaces need to do so deliberately — with a plan in place — in order to lessen some concerns for the most vulnerable workers. Moving fast without a plan to protect workers will only lead to increased risk for women, lower income workers and people of color. These workers are more likely to be in jobs that cannot be done from home or were working in jobs that they won’t be able to go back to.

The pandemic has completely changed the landscape of work, and it is workers who have not been able to work from home during the pandemic that I’m particularly concerned about as we begin to think about opening up our economy. My previous work has shown that this is about 75% of the U.S. workforce.

For those workers who are furloughed, laid off or otherwise not able to work during the pandemic, it is certainly understandable that they could be antsy to get back to work. However, workplaces need to have in place comprehensive plans to ensure that their workers are safe as operations begin to resume. These plans need to include considerations for proper personal protective equipment or PPE, physical distancing, health screening, hygiene facilities and adequate and appropriate family leave, healthcare and sick leave policies.

Workplaces should also consider having a COVID-19 coordinator who can provide informational resources to workers on how to access different leave options, including how to navigate unemployment. Of course, this coordinator should be acting in the best interest of the worker, not the employer.

Some workers will be especially at risk as more people go back to work. Bus drivers are a key example. As places of work begin to open up, more people may rely on public transportation and could cause bus drivers to be exposed to lots of people throughout the day. Same for workers in retail, who may come in contact with lots of different people and may not have the time or ability between every interaction to wash hands or sanitize their area.

Also, as workplaces begin to open before schools do, I see female workers being particularly vulnerable, given that the majority of child care and domestic duties still tend to fall to women even in dual-income families. This necessary flexibility needs to be a consideration of workplaces opening up so that employees can still care for a child or loved one and ease back into their work expectations without penalty or retribution.

Before word got around of graduate student Adam Kuczynski’s social distancing study last month, he and his advisor, Jonathan Kanter, had hoped a couple hundred people would sign up.

The , focused on how King County residents spend their time during COVID-19 physical isolation, drew 500 participants. And very quickly, a theme emerged.

“The response from the public and the media to our first survey was overwhelming,” said , a research associate professor of psychology at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý. “The main question we heard over and over again was, what should someone do to best cope with the crisis?”

Participants in the must be at least 18 years old, live in the United States and have a smartphone that can receive text messages. So with now under stay-at-home orders, Kanter and his team this week launched a new study in partnership with Bastyr University, aimed at a national audience, to test whether a motivational, mental health tip each day changes participants’ behavior during social distancing, and improves their mental and relational health.

Like the original social distancing study, which will continue to check in on participants for several months, the new research relies on people’s use of smartphones to take a survey each night about their mood and activity throughout the day. The new research will follow the same process each day for a month, but for two of the weeks, half of participants will be sent daily text messages with suggestions about how to cope – breathing exercises, for instance, tips for reaching out to friends and family, or audio clips or links with more detailed information, like how to have helpful conversations with others.

“The first month of our research suggests that, while many of us are coping well and adapting to our new normal, others are suffering in different ways. Social interaction has decreased substantially, loneliness is high, and substance use has increased for a substantial portion of our sample. We are concerned and want to help,” Kuczynski said.

All the advice is evidence-based, and the tips are meant to be easy to do, said Kanter, who runs the Center for the Science of Social Connection at the UW. At the end of the study, the other half of participants will receive the full package of tips.

“Many of us right now are overwhelmed and are trying to sort through all the opinions, advice and suggestions that are flooding social and news media. We are hoping that our tips will cut through all that noise,” Kanter said.

“We know a great deal from psychological science about how to help people with stress, anxiety and depression, as well as how to help people connect and overcome loneliness, but we don’t really know how to put all that into practice, or how best to deliver that information to the public, in a situation like the current crisis.”

Kanter and his lab hope their work will inform public health authorities about how people are coping, offer help to participants in their study, and add to the science on how to effectively and quickly disseminate public health tools in times of need.

Because the lab developed the project quickly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kanter and his team are seeking funding to continue the work.

, professor and chair of the Department of Counseling & Health Psychology at Bastyr University, is a co-investigator on the project.

For more information, contact Kanter at jonkan@uw.edu.

Social distancing, seemingly the new way of life under coronavirus, has obvious protective measures for health.

But it’s also important to maintain human connection, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý psychology researchers say, even when circumstances have changed. Isolation can affect immune functioning and increase feelings of threat and anxiety, so striking a balance helps all aspects of health.

“Any connection is better than no connection,” said , UW research associate professor of psychology. “Now is the time to reach out to friends and family and connect with them however you can. It may sound dramatic, but it really helps. Let people know how much you care about them, you’ll feel better for doing so.”

Kanter, who runs the Center for the Science of Social Connection, and , a lecturer in the UW Department of Psychology, have a few tips for staying connected — at a distance:

• Stay active, or just get out in nature
• Help someone else — in ways big and small, inside your community and out
• Call or FaceTime friends and family — don’t just text or post on social media
• Stick to routines you enjoy — they make the world feel more predictable
• Avoid looking at the news all day – read a book or watch a show just for fun
• Keep a journal
• Exercise self-compassion – treat yourself like you would a friend

“Keep things in perspective and try to stay positive,” McNichols said. “Challenges in life ultimately lead to personal growth. We WILL come out of this and we may even gain something from the experience, even if that ‘thing’ is just extreme gratitude for our ‘normal’ way of life. ”

Social distancing practices, both informal and now official, during the COVID-19 outbreak have prompted Kanter and graduate student to launch a study, for which they’re looking for King County adults to share their experiences. Participants will on their smartphone every evening for 2 ½ months. People will be asked about their emotional responses — such as feelings of loneliness or depression — and behavioral responses — such as how much time they spend interacting with others, or even how much time they spend thinking about coronavirus news.

“We know from previous research, and of course intuitively, that social isolation can negatively impact our physical and mental health, and also that people differ in their preference for solitude and the degree to which it affects them,” Kuczynski said. “We hope that participation in this study will inform public health intervention for the current pandemic right here in King County, but also in any future situations similar to this.”

“This crisis we are experiencing may not end soon,” Kanter added. “Building a foundation of healthy coping, doing everything we can to stay connected to each other, to reach out and care for each other, is imperative.”

Blatant racism is easy to identify — a shouted racial slur, a white supremacist rally, or the open discrimination, segregation and violence of the pre-civil rights era.

But more subtle forms of bias, called , emerge in the everyday exchanges among friends and strangers alike and can offend racial and ethnic minorities.

Such statements, uttered intentionally or inadvertently, draw upon stereotypes and are linked with racism and prejudice, according to a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý-led study. The research is believed to be the first of its kind to explore microaggressions from the perspective of those who commit them, and suggests that whites who are more likely to deliver microaggressions are also more likely to harbor some degree of negative feeling toward blacks, whether they know it or not.

The concept of microaggressions has garnered greater attention in today’s political environment, explained lead author , a UW research associate professor of psychology.

“Our study results offer validation to people of color when they experience microaggressions. Their reactions can’t simply be dismissed as crazy, unreasonable or too sensitive,” Kanter said. “According to our data, the reaction of a person of color — being confused, upset or offended in some way — makes sense, because they have experienced what our data show: that people who are more likely to make these comments also are more racist in other ways.”

The appears online in the journal Race and Social Problems.

For this study, the team, with the help of focus groups of students of color from three universities, devised the Cultural Cognitions and Actions Survey (CCAS) and administered it to a small group of students — 33 black, 118 white — at a large public university in the Midwest. The 56-item questionnaire asks the white respondent to imagine him- or herself in five different everyday scenarios involving interactions with black people, such as talking about current events, attending a diversity workshop, or listening to music. The respondent then considers how likely he or she is to think or say specific statements. For black respondents, the wording of the scenarios and questions was revised slightly to assess whether they would experience racism. Each of the statements included in the survey was deemed at least somewhat, if not significantly, offensive by black students.

In the “current events” scenario — the one that yielded the highest percentage of “likely” responses from whites — respondents were to imagine talking about topics in the news, such as police brutality and unemployment. More than half of white respondents said they would think or say, “All lives matter, not just black lives,” while 30 percent said they might say, “I don’t think of black people as black,” and 26 percent said they were likely to think or say, “The police have a tough job. It is not their fault if they occasionally make a mistake.” More than half of black respondents identified each of those statements as racist.

Responses on the CCAS were then related to several validated measures of racism and prejudice, to determine if one’s likelihood of making microaggressive statements was related to these other measures. An additional scale controlled for social desirability — the idea that respondents might answer in ways that put themselves in the best possible light.

Results indicated that white students who said they were more likely to make microaggressive statements were also significantly more likely to score higher on all the other measures of racism and prejudice, and results were not affected by social desirability.

The statement that yielded the highest statistical relation to other measures of racism among white respondents came from the “diversity workshop” scenario, in which a class discusses white privilege. Though only about 14 percent of white respondents said they were likely to think or say, “A lot of minorities are too sensitive,” the statement had the highest correlation with negative feelings toward blacks. Nearly 94 percent of black respondents said the statement was racist.

The correlations between statements and attitudes are averages from the study sample, Kanter said, and so the results do not address the intentions or feelings of any one person.

“It doesn’t mean that on a case-by-case basis, if you or I engaged in microaggressions, that we have cold or racist feelings toward blacks,” he said. “But the study says that regardless of the intention behind a microaggression or the feelings of the specific person who uttered it, it’s reasonable for a black person to be offended. On average, if you engage in a microaggression, it’s more likely that you have cooler feelings toward black people, and that whether you intended it or not, you’ve participated in an experience of racism for a black person.”

In many ways, overt racism has declined gradually since the civil rights movement, Kanter said, and white people often assume that because they do not utter racial slurs, or perhaps are well-versed in and value social justice, that they do not have to worry about engaging in racist behavior themselves.

“It can come as a bit of a shock to a lot of white people that their behavior and attitudes are under scrutiny,” said Kanter, who pointed out that as a white male, he has had to confront realizations about his own behavior over time. “The nature of how we’re looking at racism is changing. We’re now able to look at and root out more subtle forms of bias that weren’t focused on before because explicit racism was taking a lot of the attention.”

Taken in isolation, the size and location of the study sample limit the generalizations that can be made, Kanter said. But the idea behind the CCAS is to use it elsewhere and adapt it to focus on other racial and ethnic minorities so as to better understand racism and develop educational tools to combat it. The survey has since been used at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, he added, where early results are very similar to those reported in the published article.

Kanter said he’s heard from critics who say the study has a liberal bias, or that the research should examine offenses against white people. But he says the point is to address racism targeted at oppressed and stigmatized groups.

“We’re interested in developing interventions to help people interact with each other better, to develop trusting, nonoffensive, interracial relationships among people. If we want to decrease racism, then we need to try to decrease microaggressions,” he said.

Other authors of the study were UW graduate students and ; of the University of Connecticut, of the University of Kentucky; and of Bastyr University.

The study was funded by a grant from the American Psychological Foundation.

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For more information, contact Kanter at 206-221-2591 or jonkan@uw.edu.