The manuscript entitled, “Psychological impact of a country-wide lockdown: Role of personal, behavioral, social, and physical conditions on negative and positive affect and meaning in life,” was submitted to The Interamerican Journal of Psychology as a regular article (though perhaps this is a special issue on COVID-19).  
The authors conducted the study at the start of the pandemic in Spain, just after a lock-down order was issued by the government on March 12, 2020.   The primary purpose of the study was to examine the participants’ perceptions of risk to their physical and economic health in relation to the conditions under which they were adhering to the stay-at-home orders (e.g., if they suffered from a chronic disease, if they spent time outside, if they got laid off from work). The researchers used nonparametric statistics to calculate the strength of correlations between participants’ coping strategies or psychological resilience or quarantine activities and the participants’ perceptions of risk, the intensity of their negative and positive affect and the strength of their sense of meaning in life. The sample size was nonrandom and quite large; n=1343 adults. A survey was administered online using Qualtrics.  The survey questions related to the participants’ quarantine conditions were designed by the researchers. Pre-existing measures that were used to evaluate dimensions of participants’ personal well-being. 

The topic of this paper is timely and is well-suited for publication in The Interamerican Journal of Psychology.  Though the sample consists solely of Spaniards, the study has broad applicability in the context of the global pandemic, especially because it was conducted at a time when lock-downs were being executed in numerous industrialized countries. 

Areas for Improvement

Originality

This was a strictly empirical study with the following aim: “to analyze the affective response to compulsory home isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain.  Specifically, to analyze: a) risk perception regarding personal health and economic conditions; b) the impact of others and environmental conditions during home isolation on personal well-being (positive affect, negative affect, and meaning in life); c) the influence of psychological resilience and positive coping activities as factors promoting well-being” (p. 3). The investigation was exploratory in nature.  No hypotheses were proposed or tested. The investigation was not grounded in a specific theory of disaster mental health, coping, or resilience.

	The article is timely and absolutely relevant to current global concerns.  Given the rise in coronavirus variants and the nonzero likelihood that the human beings will face another pandemic in the future, the results of this research will have lasting value even though it is not theoretically or methodologically innovative. 

Literature Review

The literature review on empirical investigations of the impact of pandemic conditions, natural disasters and other unexpected traumatic events was thorough and current. The authors cited seven studies completed in 2020 on COVID-19 from a range of countries (e.g., Bo et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020). They also referenced research from previous epidemics including H1N1 (Cowling et al., 2010; Han et al., 2014; Prati et al., 2011), Ebola (Green et al., 2018), SARS (Ko et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2012; Mihashi et al., 2009), natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Katrina; Lee et al., 2018), industrial accidents (e.g., Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill; Osofsky et al., 2011), and gun violence (e.g., Washington, DC Sniper Killings; Moore et al., 2004). The authors also referenced the World Health Organization’s directives and recommendations (WHO; 2020a; 2020b) regarding COVID-19.  These topics were well covered. 

	However, the concepts of resilience, the role of positive emotion and coping, and meaning in life are neglected topics in the Introduction. There was insufficient attention to their importance. Why study these psychological phenomena in particular? What is the salience of these psychological constructs to coping with the threat of COVID-19 and home confinement? These questions seem especially important for the concepts of resilience, positive affect, and meaning in life which comprise the most significant results and are a central part of the Discussion. 

	Recommendation:  Include definitions of these constructs and look to the literature that describes their role in coping with stress and anxiety. Define what you mean by meaning in life (MIL) and discuss its importance and is associations with positive emotion. This discussion will help substantiate why you chose the Morgan and Robinson version (2013) of the Morgan and Farsides’ (2009) Meaningful Life Measure when there are others that are better established (e.g., Meaning in Life Questionnaire; MLQ; Steger et al., 2006). There is a significant literature on MIL.  The authors might find value in the following papers:

Heintzelman, S.J., & King, L.A. (2014).  Life is pretty meaningful.  American Psychologist, 69, 561-574. http://dx.doi/10.1037/a0035049
Park, C. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 257-301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0018301
Park, C. L., & George, L.S. (2013). Assessing meaning and meaning making in the context of stressful life events: Measurement tools and approaches. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8, 483-504. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.830762
Steger, M.F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M. (2006). The Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the presence of and search for meaning in life. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53, 80-93. http://dx.doi/10.1037/0022-0167.53.1.80

Method

	Participants. A strength of this study is the description of the participants’ living situations.  Tables 1 and 2 are particularly helpful in getting a clear picture of the circumstances in which participants were living at the time of the study.  

	It is curious that there is no information on the ethnicity of the participants.  I googled the population of Spain and there is a significant immigrant population which would imply some degree of cultural/ethnic diversity in the sample.  Ethnic identity/immigration status may be tied to conditions in which participants were enduring the lock-down and access to resources like open spaces, which depend on location of housing. 

Recommendation: If such information on culture/ethnicity and/or immigrant status is available and salient, please report it. Additionally, the sample seems quite educated.  It would be helpful to contrast this sample with the educational levels of Spaniards as a whole as part of the Limitations Section in the Discussion. 

	Materials. There is not a clear rationale for why the measures used were selected. The foundation for such selection could be made in the Literature Review as suggested above, followed by a reference to each measure’s salience to the research questions herein. 

Recommendation: Please provide a rationale for the selected measures and provide more detail on the reliability and validity of the measures.  The alpha coefficients for the current study are reported, but there is no other information from which to discern the value of these tools.  

Results

Analyses.  The selection of nonparametric statistics seems appropriate.  

The p values of p<.001 in relation to the effect sizes η2, which are notably small, may warrant double-checking the analyses.  The very low p values are not consistent with such small effect sizes. Another way to check the analyses is to report a Z-score for each of the U statistics.  This may be accomplished because the U statistic has a normal distribution due to the large sample sizes. 

Recommendation: Check analyses and/or compute a Z-Score for each statistic. 

The most significant results, including the “difference in affect and meaning in life depending on frequency of coping behaviors” (See Table 3) yielded effect sizes that are quite small. For example, the effect of varying levels of exercise on negative affect is significant at the p<.001 level but η2 is .018, which is extraordinarily small. If η2 is .018, this means that only 1.8% of the variance in negative affect is explained by the frequency of exercise. Similarly, the following percent variance in positive affect was explained by Keeping Routines (4.3%), Exercising (4.6%), Video calls, (1.4%), Online Creative Activities (7.3%), Community Participation (2.3%), Helping Others (1.2%) and Art and Online Activities (2,2%) (pp. 11-12).  It is not clear how potent the coping behaviors actually are, given these small effect sizes. 

Recommendation: Discuss the small effect sizes. 

Discussion

	I am not surprised that coping behaviors were not related to changes negative affect, but were related to increases in positive affect. Retrospective measures of positive and negative affect are known to be independent of one another (Diener & Emmons, 1984; Ganzach, et al., 2020) with caveats related to measurement (Green & Salovey, 1999).   However, I do not think that this is intuitive to most people. One way to discuss the implications of this result is to refer to Conoley and Scheel’s work on Goal Focused Positive Psychotherapy (2018) and reiterate their metaphor of using a psychological rather than physical sciences metaphor to discuss the benefits of positive coping behaviors (e.g., helping others and exercise).   GFPP and Positive Psychotherapy (Rashid & Seligman, 2018) describe positive approaches to psychotherapy as ones that build positive emotion, which enhances capacity for wellness even in the context of negative events and emotions. Such a reference might make a good addition to the discussion of implications of the results.  

Clarity of Writing

	There is some awkward phrasing in the writing and odd use of terms. The Abstract needs to be revised for greater clarity. 

	An example of lack of clarity is the first sentence under the header Data Analysis, which states “Spearman’s correlations were carried out, as well as Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test” (p. 8).  This section needs to be revised because it is unclear which variables were used for these statistics.  Also “carried out” is colloquial.  How about “computed”?

	Similarly, page 8, par. 4 reads, “We decided to study two specific types of risk perception that may be key [my emphasis] in this context, health risk perception, due to the origins of the lockdown as a health-related issue, and economic risk perceptions, due to the massive impact on the economic infrastructure cause by the lockdown measures” (p. 8).  Key to what?  Please clarify.  

	Several of the paragraphs are only two sentences long and might be collapsed. Page 3 include a paragraph that has only 1 sentence, which is not consistent with APA style. 

Minor Edits

	APA Style dictates not starting a sentence with a number (see page 3 line 20). 

References

Conoley, C. W., & Scheel, M. J. (2018).  Goal focused positive psychotherapy: A strengths-based approach. Oxford University Press. 
Diener, E., & Emmons, R. A. (1984). The independence of positive and negative affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(5), 1105–1117. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.47.5.1105
Ganzazh, Y., Yaor, E., Shatz, T.M., Bulmash, B., Greenberg, D. (2020). The retrospective independence of positive and negative affect. Social Cognition, 38, 470-488. 
Green, D.P., & Salovey, P. I(1999). n what sense are positive and negative affect independent? A reply to Tellegen, Watson, and Clark. Psychological Science, 10, 304-306. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00158
Rashid, T., & Seligman, M. (2018). Positive psychotherapy: A clinician’s manual. Oxford University press. 
