The latest round of acute COVID hysteria over a new mutant variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (#B11529)was the final nudge I needed to write this post to hopefully help provide insight into the diverse human behavioral and psychological reaction to the pandemic and what such reactions may reveal about individual differences in sensitivity to environmental context. As my scientific work is largely in the field referred to as developmental psychopathology, I draw on concepts and theories that have generated much thinking and research within it. Broadly speaking, developmental psychopathology is an academic field of research and scholarship that examines the development of mental illness symptoms and disorders across the life course and the biological, social, and cultural factors that may give rise to and maintain them.
Although my initial thinking on the behavioral response to the pandemic centered around a differential susceptibility1 to environmental influences model as possessing significant heuristic and explanatory value, I am now strongly inclined to think the classic diathesis-stress model possesses the most explanatory value (and is the more efficient or parsimonious of the two models) for the marked emergence of anxiety and fear in a distinct class of the population. Although beyond the scope of this piece, it should be noted that these models, as well as other models of the development of psychopathology (e.g., the stress inoculation model), overlap both in terms of the thinking behind them as well as the predictions they make, and thus adoption of one model to explain population-level human phenomena should not be seen as necessarily excluding the others.
Below I discuss the diathesis-stress or dual-risk model of sensitivity to environmental context, how it relates to the pandemic and individual behavioral responses to it, and offer some broader, loosely organized observations with especial reference to a more general conceptual notion of sensory processing sensitivity and “Long COVID”.