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Objective: The COVID-19 outbreak has changed the habits of people all over the world. Several hours in front of computer screens, along with the inherent instability and uncertainty produced by the pandemic, have compromised people’s psychological well-being. This study investigates the impact of the frequency of social media usage and psychological distress on the levels of body dissatisfaction before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: A total of 289 Portuguese (n = 167) and British (n = 122) young women aged 18–35 participated in the study. Levels of body dissatisfaction, stress, depression, anxiety, and frequency of social media usage were assessed using self-report questionnaires before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Student’s t test and linear regression were used for the data analysis. Results: The Portuguese group presented a higher level of body dissatisfaction before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in comparison to the British. Both groups showed increased levels of body dissatisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, explained by the widespread use of social media and high levels of psychological distress. Conclusions: Our study reveals that high levels of negative affect and excessive social media usage have a deleterious effect on Portuguese and British young women during the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides a theoretical foundation to motivate the design of new tools to reduce body-related distress and help moderate social media use for similar future situations.

The ability to empathize with another person's inner experience is believed to be a central element of our social interactions. Previous research has focused on cognitive (e.g., theory of mind) and emotional (e.g., emotional contagion) empathy, and less on behavioral factors (i.e., the ability to respond empathically). Recent studies suggest that the Default Mode Network (DMN) mediates individual variability in distinct empathy-related behaviors. However, little is known about DMN activity during actual empathic responses, understood in this study as the ability to communicate our understanding of the others' experience back to them. This study used an empathy response paradigm with 28 participants (22-37 years old) to analyze the relationship between the quality of empathic responses to 14 empathy-eliciting vignettes and patterns of attenuation in the DMN. Overall, the results suggest that high levels of empathic response, are associated with sustained activation of the DMN when compared with lower levels of empathy. Our results demonstrate that the DMN becomes increasingly involved in empathy-related behavior, as our level of commitment to the other's experience increases. This study represents a first attempt to understand the relation between the capacity for responding in a supportive way to others' needs and the intra-individual variability of the pattern of the DMN attenuation. Here we underline the critical role that the DMN plays in high-level social cognitive processes and corroborate the DMN role in different psychiatric disorders associated with a lack of empathy.