Lockdown in Chinese university dormitories: Significant increase in negative feelings and time perception distortion

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global crisis resulting in lockdowns worldwide. Studies found that these could amplify negative affects predictive of disturbances in time perception. However, all existing studies on this topic concentrated on the general population during a lockdown at home. There was no research on university students living in dormitories. This study fills a gap in the literature by investigating the affective states and awareness of the passage of time of Chinese university students during an exceptional dormitory lockdown. Using a snowball sampling approach, this web-based study recruited 225 volunteers (136 girls, 17-27 years old) during a dormitory lockdown. The online survey consisted of questions on demographic information, affective states (the Chinese version of the depression anxiety stress scales-21 (DASS-21) on depression, anxiety, and stress), and sense of the passage of time (the translated version of the assessment of passage of time over daily, weekly and yearly periods). The researchers shared the questionnaire link via the social media application WeChat. The study applied descriptive statistics and column charts to represent students' affective states and sense of the passage of time under extreme conditions and Pearson's correlation analysis to examine the impact of affective states on their sense of time. The study's results indicate that the dormitory lockdown caused a significant increase in all depression, anxiety, and stress categories of the DASS-21, as well as a distortion of the sense of time passing. However, the direction of the distortion differed from that in previous studies. Moreover, a Pearson correlation analysis showed that none of the three negative affects could be associated with students' sense of time. The findings of this study indicate an increased vulnerability of students due to the lockdown. Their emotions were strongly affected, requiring particular interventions to preserve their mental well-being. In addition, they showed a different distortion direction of time passage. Finally, they differed in the correlations between negative affect and the sense of passage of time compared to the general population in lockdown at home. This shows a need to investigate the impact of psychological states on students' routines and quality of life in emergencies. This study's scope should be expanded by incorporating additional factors pertaining to the passage of time and by integrating cross-cultural comparisons.