Alabama university to study emotions, behavior and COVID‐19

Abstract

A psychology researcher at the University of Alabama was awarded a federal grant to study how people's emotions influence their response to the spread of the novel coronavirus. “Right now, there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in day‐to‐day life around the globe,” Philip Gable, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, said in a March 30 university news release. “We are interested in the role uncertainty plays in how people feel and behave, and we are especially interested to see how non‐conscious emotions toward avoiding the virus influence health behaviors.” Gable is leading the project awarded nearly $65,000 under the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Rapid Response Research funding program, which is set up to review and fund projects with an urgent need to gather data during or right after emergency events and natural disasters. The research at UA is part of the NSF's effort to quickly start nonmedical, nonclinical care research that can be used immediately to explore how to model and understand the spread of COVID‐19, to inform and educate about the science of virus transmission and prevention and to encourage the development of processes and actions to address this global challenge. The spreading COVID‐19 in the United States creates a social psychological problem of a scale never encountered in modern times, the release stated. The findings will be published and the anonymous data from the app will be publicly available.