JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the German government and the sixteen German federal states issued a variety of countermeasures to decelerate the spread of the so-called coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 virus) to prevent a collapse of the healthcare infrastructure. These measures comprised, amongst others, social distancing, the temporary closure of shops and schools, a ban of large public gatherings and meetings with people not living in the same household.

Objective:

It is fair to assume, that the issued countermeasures have heavily affected social life and psychological functioning. We therefore aimed to examine possible effects of this lockdown in conjunction with daily new infections and the state of the national economy on peoples’ interests, motives, and other psychological states.

Methods:

We derived 249 keywords from the Google Trends (GT) database tapping into 27 empirically and rationally selected psychological domains. To overcome issues with reliability and specificity of individual indicator variables, broad factors were derived by means of time series factor analysis (TSFA). All domains were subjected to a change point as well as a time series regression analysis with infections rates, countermeasures, and state of economy as predictors. All keywords and analyses were preregistered prior to analysing.

Results:

With the pandemic arriving in Germany, significant changes in peoples’ search interests were observed in virtually all domains. While most of the changes were short-lasting, each had a distinguishable onset during the lockdown period. Regression analysis of the GT data confirmed pronounced autoregressive effects for the investigated variables while forecasting by means of the tested predictors daily new infections, countermeasures, and the state of economy was moderate at best.

Conclusions:

Our findings indicate that peoples’ interests, motives and psychological states are heavily affected in times of crisis and lockdown. Changes in search behaviour are consistent over multiple domains representing social life and psychological functioning. Thus, a GT analysis may provide information for policymakers to adapt and develop intervention, information, and prevention strategies, especially when countermeasures are in effect.