Self-Perceived Loneliness and Depression During the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Two-Wave Replication Study

COVID-19 studies to date have documented some of the initial health consequences of lockdown restrictions adopted by many countries. Combining a data-driven machine learning paradigm and a statistical analysis approach, our previous paper documented a U-shape pattern in levels of self-perceived loneliness in both the UK and Greek populations during the first lockdown (17 April to 17 July 2020). The current paper aimed to test the robustness of these results. Specifically, we tested a) for the dependence of the chosen model by adopting a new one - namely, support vector regressor (SVR). Furthermore, b) whether the patterns of self-perceived loneliness found in data from the first UK national lockdown could be generalizable to the second wave of the UK lockdown (17 October 2020 to 31 January 2021). The first part of the study involved training an SVR model on the 75% of the UK dataset from wave 1 (n total = 435). This SVR model was then tested on the remaining 25% of data (MSE training = 2.04; MSE test = 2.29), which resulted in depressive symptoms to be the most important variable - followed by self-perceived loneliness. Statistical analysis of depressive symptoms by week of lockdown resulted in a significant U-shape pattern between week 3 to 7 of lockdown. In the second part of the study, data from wave 2 of the UK lockdown (n = 263) was used to conduct a graphical and statistical inspection of the week-by-week distribution of scores regarding self-perceived loneliness. Despite a graphical U-shaped pattern between week 3 and 9 of lockdown, levels of loneliness were not between weeks of lockdown. Consistent with past studies, study findings suggest that self-perceived loneliness and depressive symptoms may be two of the most relevant symptoms to address when imposing lockdown restrictions.