March 2022 CIC Webinar: Featured Q&A
Our monthly CIC webinars inspire some really fantastic audience Q&A sessions! In each monthly newsletter, we highlight one of the insightful questions raised from the webinar attendees.
A Featured Question from our March 2022 Webinar
This question was for Lilian Azer and Rachel Wu from the University of California, Riverside. Lilian and Rachel presented to our audience their research on the impact of the pandemic on education and learning, Older adults’ learning and adaptation as resilience processes to counter social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can watch Lilian Azer and Rachel Wu's full presentation on our YouTube channel.
Question:
Your research was surprising in that it showed that individuals who learned new skills during the pandemic were more likely to exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety. Could you say a bit more about this finding?
Answer from Lilian Azer:
Yes, we also found this result surprising. We saw that the more hours you spent learning a new skill, the more depression participants reported. This is a contrast with pre-pandemic studies, which showed that participants who spent a lot of time in engaging leisure activities had better mental health outcomes and displayed higher executive functioning ability. We think that in this study, participants spent more time learning new skills in isolation. We are interested in reviewing data from other pandemic waves to see if isolation is indeed a predictor of more depressive symptoms in remote learners.
Thank you to all of our March 2022 speakers and our CIC Community audience members for keeping the conversation going!