Welcome to the CovSocial Project!
Our research aims to understand how the Berlin population felt and behaved during the corona crisis. At this point, data assessment is complete and several published papers from the CovSocial project can already be found here.We have also released a report covering the descriptive findings of the various measures of mental well-being, resilience and social cohesion and their changes over the seven measurement time points in 2020/2021.
The CovSocial study is divided into two phases. During the first phase from January 2020 to March 2021, we repeatedly asked a group of Berliners about their experiences of living through a pandemic with the help of questionnaires presented through a smartphone app. We were interested in understanding:
- In what ways did the daily life of Berliners change?
- How did they feel at various time points of the pandemic?
- What caused them stress and what helped them manage it?
The focus is on finding out whether the pandemic and the related lockdowns were associated with changes in different aspects of mental health such as depression, stress or loneliness, resilience such as life-satisfaction, optimism or coping strategies as well as aspects of social cohesion such as trust, belonging and social interactions. Understanding the psychosocial impact of such global stressors will help us to develop a roadmap for how challenges of this magnitude could be better managed in the future.
In the second phase of our study from August 2021 to March 2022, we tested app-delivered online mental trainings aiming at boosting mental health with some of our participants from the previous phase. More specifically, we compared the efficiency of a 10-week mindfulness program with an equally long socio-emotional partner-based program (Dyads), both containing 12-minutes daily mental practices and weekly deepening webinars with teachers. We aim at exploring whether such online interventions can provide a scalable solution to community mental health problems in such crises. The data collection for this phase is now finished and we have moved on to analysing the data.
Download Phase 1 Brochure
If you are interested in descriptive findings from the first phase of the project, please download the CovSocial Broshure as a pdf. This report shows how Berliners felt during the first two major lockdowns in Germany.
News
December 01-02, 2022 – This international symposium took place in the Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin from 1st to 2nd December 2022. The main focus was on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, resilience and aspects of social cohesion as well as on interventions implemented to reduce the negative impact this global crisis had on psychological vulnerability worldwide.
April 20, 2022 – The Berlin University Alliance reports on two new publications within the CovSocial project. (German only)
April 02, 2022 – In this interview with Antje Lang-Lendorff from taz Tania Singer talks about limits and chances of empathy. (German only)
March 30, 2022 – In an interview with Erik Heier of tip Berlin, Tania Singer talks about the CovSocial project and the impact of pandemic lockdowns on the mental health of Berlin’s population. (German)
