Life satisfaction and happiness in patients shielding from the COVID-19 global pandemic: A randomised controlled study of the ‘mood as information’ theory
Authors: Jos A Bosch
Alice O&#x27;Donnell
Lydia Wilson
Richard Borrows
Journal: PLoS ONE (2020)
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Keywords: mood as information theory; COVID-19 pandemic; health care providers; life satisfaction evaluations; priming question
Affiliations: University of Birmingham Medical School, College of Medical and Dental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom., Faculteit der Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen, Programmagroep: Clinical Psychology, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands., Department of Nephrology and Kidney Transplantation, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Abstract:  Objectives: To extrapolate the 'mood as information' theory to the unique and ecologically relevant setting of the COVID-19 pandemic; the specific aim was to inform health care providers of the impact of bringing the pandemic to salience during life satisfaction evaluations, assessing whether this 'prime' results in increased or decreased reports of satisfaction which are derived unconsciously. Design: Prospective Randomised Interventional Study. Setting: Renal Transplant Department in a tertiary centre in the United Kingdom. Participants: 200 Renal transplant patients aged between 20 and 88 years. Telephone interviews were undertaken between 1st May, 2020 and 29th May, 2020, at the height of 'shielding' from COVID-19. Interventions: Participants were randomised into 2 groups, with 1 group receiving a simple 'priming question' regarding the COVID pandemic and the other group having no prior contact. Main outcome measurements: Individuals were then asked to rate their own overall lifetime happiness; desire to change; overall life satisfaction and momentary happiness on a scale of 1 to 10 for each measure. Independent sample t-tests were used to compare results between the two groups, with a type 1 error rate below 5% considered statistically significant. Results: Participants' overall happiness with their life as a whole revealed that individuals who were primed with a question about COVID-19 reported increased overall happiness with their life compared to individuals who had not been primed (+0.88, 95% confidence interval 0.42 to 1.35, p = 0.0002). In addition, participants in the primed group reported less desire to change their life when compared to the non-primed group (-1.35, 95% confidence interval -2.06 to -0.65, p = 0.0002). Participants who were primed with the COVID-19 question also reported a higher overall satisfaction with their life than individuals who had not been primed (+1.01, 95% confidence interval 0.50 to 1.52, p = 0.0001). Finally, the participants who received the priming question demonstrated increased reported momentary happiness (+0.64, 95% confidence interval 0.03 to 1.24, p = 0.04). Conclusions: The results demonstrated that bringing salience to the COVID-19 pandemic with a simple question leads to positive changes in both momentary happiness and other components of global life satisfaction, thereby extrapolating evidence for the application of the mood-as-information theory to more extreme life circumstances. Given the importance of patient-reported evaluations, these findings have implications for how, when and where accurate and reproducible measurements of life satisfaction should be obtained. 

Retracted: No

PubPeer comments:
 The title of this article suggests that the authors are testing the  mood as information theory. First, the authors are not conducting the proper analysis to test the hypothesis. The main prediction of the hypothesis is that a question about Covid-19 should eliminate the use of mood as information. Thus, mood should be a weaker predictor of life-satisfaction in the Covid-19 condition, which needs to be tested with moderated regression. Second, the authors ignore that recent replication studies have failed to replicate the original results by Schwarz and Clore (1983) in several studies with larger samples. Given these sever limitations, the article should not be cited as evidence for or against the mood as information hypothesis. The article does report some mean level differences as a function of the priming condition, but it is unclear why participants rate their lives as better when they are primed to think about Covid-19. This would require a whole new program of research. Yap, S. C. Y., Wortman, J., Anusic, I., Baker, S. G., Scherer, L. D., Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E. (2017). The effect of mood on judgments of subjective well-being: Nine tests of the judgment model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(6), 939u2013961. https: doi.org 10.1037 pspp0000115 ,