Gender differences in the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on potentially addictive behaviors. An emotion-mediated analysis

We study the impact of the spring 2020 lockdown in France on gender-related potentially addictive behaviors and associated negative emotions. We rely on an online survey we administered 1 week after the beginning of the lockdown, with responses collected within 2 weeks after the beginning of the lockdown (N = 1,087). We focus on potential addictions to non-creative activities as food consumption and smartphone usage (female-related), and videogame play (male-related). We find that women were about 1.6 times more likely than men to losing control of their usual diet and about 2.3 times more likely than men to increase smartphone usage, while no significant gender effect is detected as for increased videogame play. This is since the negative emotions driving the increase of female-related non-creative activities (sadness, discouragement, and nervousness) were themselves female-related, while the negative emotions driving the increase of male-related non-creative activities (boredom, emptiness, and stress) were shared by women too. Our study supports the intuition that the same negative emotion induced by COVID-19 side-effects could lead to different potentially addictive behaviors; this difference is explained by the interplay between different gender’s sensitivities to such emotion and different gender’s preferences for specific non-creative activities.