Did the Pandemic Change Your Personality?

Author: Sue C. | Category: Health | Date: 11-16-2022

This article discusses how the pandemic has changed people's personalities. Please read it and reflect on whether or not you have undergone personality changes, or if you've observed the pandemic's personality-changing effect on others.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/health/covid-impact-personality-change.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-coronavirus&variant=show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc

Did the Pandemic Change Your Personality? Possibly.

For more than two years, Covid disrupted social rituals and rites of passage. Now a recent study suggests we have become less extroverted, creative, agreeable and conscientious. The declines in some traits were sharper among young people.

Lucy Nguyen participates in a group scream at the Zionsville Youth Soccer Fields in Whitestown, Indiana.

Lucy Nguyen participates in a group scream at the Zionsville Youth Soccer Fields in Whitestown, Indiana.Credit...Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times

By Christine Chung

Oct. 22, 2022

Whether it was attending school lectures, making memorable first impressions at that first office job or packing the floor at a concert, many of the social rituals that had been rites of passage for young people were disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

That has left people like Thuan Phung, a junior at the Parsons School of Design who lives in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, feeling “weird” about real-life interactions. After two years of virtual instruction, he is back in the classroom.

“On Zoom you can mute,” Mr. Phung, 25, said. “It took me a while to know how to talk to people.”

Now, a recent study of people’s personalities suggests that the discomfort he’s feeling is not uncommon for people in his generation, who were forced into the isolation of pandemic restrictions in their 20s, already a time of social anxiety for many of them. (more)

About: Sue C.

Hi All: Like most people in the Bay Area, I'm sheltering at home. I'm trying to use this opportunity to catch up on projects that are on my back burner and trying not to feel too anxious about the worst case scenarios that are circulating.