ArticleBJPsych open2022
The consequences of a year of the COVID-19 pandemic for the mental health of young adult twins in England and Wales.
Article in BJPsych open, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Review
- Using Speech Features and Machine Learning Models to Predict Emotional and Behavioral Problems in Chinese Adolescents.Depression and anxiety · 2025Article
- Psychological Well-Being in Adults Across the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study.International journal of public health · 2025Article
- What set some young adults apart during the COVID-19 pandemic? Mental health trajectories, risk and protective factors in an Australian longitudinal study.The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry · 2024Article
- Mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and young adults: empirical analysis of the past, present and the way forward.BJPsych open · 2023Article
- Heterogeneity in the trajectories of psychological distress among late adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic.JCPP advances · 2023Article
- Twins Early Development Study (TEDS): A genetically sensitive investigation of mental health outcomes in the mid-twenties.JCPP advances · 2023Article
- Genetic and environmental contributions to the subjective burden of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.BMC psychology · 2023Article
- Are Small Effects the Indispensable Foundation for a Cumulative Psychological Science? A Reply to Götz et al. (2022).Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Is the Pandemic Wearing Us Out? A Cross-Sectional Study of the Prevalence of Fatigue in Adult Twins without Previous SARS-CoV-2 Infection.Journal of clinical medicine · 2022Article
- Increased genetic contribution to wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- The winding roads to adulthood: A twin study.JCPP advances · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
17 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected all our lives, not only through the infection itself but also through the measures taken to control the spread of the virus (e.g. lockdown).
aimsHere, we investigated how the COVID-19 pandemic and unprecedented lockdown affected the mental health of young adults in England and Wales.
methodWe compared the mental health symptoms of up to 4773 twins in their mid-20s in 2018 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (T1) and during four-wave longitudinal data collection during the pandemic in April, July and October 2020, and in March 2021 (T2-T5) using phenotypic and genetic longitudinal designs.
resultsThe average changes in mental health were small to medium and mainly occurred from T1 to T2 (average Cohen d = 0.14). Despite the expectation of catastrophic effects of the pandemic on mental health, we did not observe trends in worsening mental health during the pandemic (T3-T5). Young people with pre-existing mental health problems were disproportionately affected at the beginning of the pandemic, but their increased problems largely subsided as the pandemic persisted. Twin analyses indicated that the aetiology of individual differences in mental health symptoms did not change during the lockdown (average heritability 33%); the average genetic correlation between T1 and T2-T5 was 0.95, indicating that genetic effects before the pandemic were substantially correlated with genetic effects up to a year later.
conclusionsWe conclude that on average the mental health of young adults in England and Wales has been remarkably resilient to the effects of the pandemic and associated lockdown.
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