📄 social_science

Perceived Nonverbal Disruption and Anxiety During COVID19: The Role of Expressive Autonomy

This research demonstrates that during the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety was driven more by the perceived frustration of expressive autonomy caused by nonverbal disruptions than by the actual reduction in nonverbal behaviors, with this relationship mediated by autonomy frustration within a Self-Determination Theory framework.

Original authors: Zachary R. Glowacki, Christopher R. Glowacki, Zachary M. Carr

Published 2026-06-25

📖 4 min read☕ Coffee break read

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Zachary R. Glowacki, Christopher R. Glowacki, Zachary M. Carr

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

The Big Idea: It's Not About How Much You Talk, It's About How Free You Feel

Imagine you are a musician. You can still pick up your guitar and strum the strings (this is behavior). But, what if someone put a heavy, stiff glove on your hand that made it impossible to play the notes you wanted to play? You are still "playing," but you feel frustrated, stiff, and anxious because you can't express the music in your head.

This study is about what happened to our "social music" during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers wanted to know: Was our anxiety caused by the fact that we stopped hugging and shaking hands, or was it caused by the feeling that we were forced to wear those "gloves" and couldn't express ourselves naturally?

The Two Main Characters in the Study

The researchers looked at two different things to see which one made people feel more anxious:

NBE (Nonverbal Behavioral Engagement): This is a count of how often you did things like hugging, high-fiving, or shaking hands. Think of this as counting the steps you took. Did you walk 100 steps or 10 steps?
CNIM (Perceived Nonverbal Disruption): This is a measure of how much you felt your ability to communicate naturally was broken or blocked. Think of this as how much the shoes hurt your feet while you walked. Did you feel like you were walking in a straight line, or did you feel like you were constantly tripping over invisible obstacles?

Study 1: The "What" Happened (Spring 2021)

The researchers asked 186 people about their habits and feelings during the pandemic.

The Finding: The number of hugs or handshakes people gave (NBE) didn't really predict how anxious they felt. You could be hugging a lot or hugging a little, and your anxiety levels didn't change much based on that number alone.
The Real Culprit: The feeling of disruption (CNIM) was the big predictor. People who felt like their natural way of communicating was blocked, awkward, or restricted reported much higher anxiety.
The Analogy: It didn't matter if you were a "social butterfly" or a "loner" during the pandemic. What mattered was whether you felt like you were forced to dance in a straightjacket. If you felt your expressive freedom was crushed, you felt anxious. If you felt you could still express yourself, even if it was different, you felt better.
Gender Note: The study found that for women, doing more nonverbal behaviors (like hugging) actually seemed to link to higher anxiety, perhaps because they were trying harder to connect in a world that made it difficult. For men, this link wasn't there. However, the feeling of "disruption" hurt everyone's mental health equally, regardless of gender.

Study 2: The "Why" It Happened (Fall 2021)

The researchers asked 143 more people to dig deeper. They wanted to know why feeling disrupted made people anxious. They used a theory called Self-Determination Theory, which suggests we need three things to be happy: feeling connected, feeling capable, and feeling free to choose (autonomy).

The Mechanism: They found that the "gloves" (disruption) made people feel like they lost their Autonomy.
The Chain Reaction:
1. The pandemic made people feel like they couldn't express themselves naturally (High CNIM).
2. This made them feel like they had no control over their own social actions (Low Autonomy).
3. This loss of control is what directly caused the Anxiety.
What Didn't Matter: It wasn't that people felt they were bad at talking (Competence) or that they felt lonely (Relatedness) that caused the anxiety. It was specifically the feeling of being forced to act in a certain way that felt wrong to them.

The Takeaway in Plain English

During the pandemic, our anxiety wasn't just about being isolated or not seeing people enough. It was about the psychological frustration of trying to be human in a world that told us how to act.

The Paper's Conclusion: Anxiety during social restrictions is shaped less by how much we interact and more by how constrained we feel while interacting.
The Key Insight: If you can't express yourself freely (even if you are still talking to people), your brain interprets that as a threat, leading to anxiety. The study suggests that the "pain" of the pandemic wasn't just the lack of contact; it was the loss of expressive freedom.

In short: It's not about how many hugs you got; it's about whether you felt like you were allowed to give them the way you wanted to. When that freedom is taken away, anxiety goes up.

Technical Summary: Perceived Nonverbal Disruption and Anxiety During COVID-19: The Role of Expressive Autonomy

Problem Statement
The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered nonverbal communication channels, including touch, physical proximity, and facial expressiveness, through public health measures such as masking and distancing. While existing literature has largely attributed pandemic-related emotional distress to reduced social interaction frequency or social isolation, this research posits a critical distinction: the psychological impact may stem less from the frequency of nonverbal behaviors and more from the perceived disruption to expressive freedom. The authors argue that failing to distinguish between behavioral engagement (what individuals do) and perceived expressive constraint (how constrained they feel) obscures a primary source of distress. Specifically, the study investigates whether perceived nonverbal disruption predicts anxiety, loneliness, and life satisfaction more robustly than behavioral engagement, and whether this relationship is mediated by autonomy frustration within a Self-Determination Theory (SDT) framework.

Methodology
The research employs a two-study cross-sectional design conducted during distinct phases of the pandemic (Spring 2021 and Fall 2021).

Study 1 (N = 186): Conducted in March 2021, this study utilized a hierarchical multiple regression design to examine the associations between Nonverbal Behavioral Engagement (NBE) and the COVID-19 Nonverbal Impact Measure (CNIM) with anxiety, loneliness, and life satisfaction. NBE was measured as a composite of self-reported frequency of positive nonverbal touch (handshakes, hugs, high-fives). CNIM was a single-item index assessing the subjective global appraisal of pandemic-related disruption to nonverbal communication. Social connectedness was included as a covariate, and gender was tested as an exploratory moderator.
Study 2 (N = 143): Conducted in September 2021, this study extended the design to test a motivational mechanism. It utilized parallel multiple mediation analysis (PROCESS Model 4) to examine whether psychological need frustration (autonomy, competence, relatedness) mediated the relationship between CNIM and anxiety. Psychological needs were assessed via open-ended prompts regarding pandemic-related nonverbal interactions, which were content-coded by trained raters on a 5-point ordinal scale ranging from extreme frustration to extreme satisfaction.

Key Results

Predictive Validity of CNIM vs. NBE: In both studies, CNIM emerged as a robust predictor of anxiety, independent of NBE and social connectedness. In Study 1, CNIM significantly predicted anxiety ( $\beta = .23, p = .001$ ), whereas NBE showed a weaker association ( $\beta = .14, p = .040$ ). Neither CNIM nor NBE significantly predicted loneliness or life satisfaction once social connectedness was controlled for.
Gender Moderation: Study 1 found that gender moderated the relationship between NBE and psychological outcomes (e.g., higher NBE was associated with greater anxiety and lower life satisfaction for women, but not men). However, gender did not moderate the relationship between CNIM and any psychological outcome, suggesting that the experience of expressive disruption is a shared psychological phenomenon across genders.
Mediation by Autonomy: Study 2 confirmed that autonomy frustration mediates the association between CNIM and anxiety. The indirect effect of CNIM on anxiety through autonomy was significant (indirect effect = 0.136, 95% CI [0.015, 0.323]). When autonomy was included in the model, the direct effect of CNIM on anxiety became non-significant, indicating full mediation. Competence and relatedness did not serve as significant mediators.

Key Contributions

Conceptual Distinction: The research empirically distinguishes between nonverbal behavioral engagement (frequency) and perceived nonverbal disruption (subjective appraisal). It demonstrates that anxiety during social constraint is driven more by the latter than the former.
Development of CNIM: The study validates the COVID-19 Nonverbal Impact Measure (CNIM) as a brief, single-item index capable of capturing the psychological dimension of expressive disruption that is not reducible to behavioral frequency.
Mechanism Identification: By integrating Self-Determination Theory, the paper identifies autonomy frustration as the specific psychological pathway linking perceived nonverbal disruption to anxiety. It suggests that distress arises not merely from a lack of connection, but from the thwarting of volitional, self-endorsed expression.
Specificity of Outcomes: The findings highlight that perceived expressive disruption is selectively associated with anxiety (a state sensitive to uncertainty and constraint) rather than broader indicators of well-being like loneliness or life satisfaction, which appear more dependent on stable relational resources.

Significance and Claims
The authors claim that these findings refine existing accounts of pandemic mental health by shifting the focus from interaction quantity to the quality of expressive experience. The paper asserts that anxiety during periods of social constraint is shaped less by reductions in nonverbal behavior itself and more by perceived limits on expressive freedom.

The significance of this work lies in its implication that interventions aimed at mitigating distress during public health emergencies or other forms of social disruption should not focus solely on maintaining interaction frequency. Instead, efforts should prioritize preserving clarity, flexibility, and perceived freedom in nonverbal expression, even when behavioral restrictions are necessary. The authors note that while the findings are specific to the transitional phases of the COVID-19 pandemic (March and September 2021), they align with broader literature suggesting that anxiety increases in environments characterized by ambiguous or constrained expressive norms. The authors remain modest regarding causal inference due to the cross-sectional nature of the data, acknowledging that longitudinal and experimental designs are necessary to establish temporal ordering and confirm causal mechanisms.

The Big Idea: It's Not About How Much You Talk, It's About How Free You Feel

The Two Main Characters in the Study

Study 1: The "What" Happened (Spring 2021)

Study 2: The "Why" It Happened (Fall 2021)

The Takeaway in Plain English

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