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This paper aims to demonstrate early psychological concomitants of the Covid-19 pandemic in England on a sample of younger and older people.

A cross-sectional quantitative questionnaire (n = 1608) was conducted on the Prolific website. Participants completed the PERMA Scale (Flourishing), the four Office of National Statistics (ONS4) Well-being Questions, the Clinical Outcomes Measure in Routine Evaluation (CORE-10) and the short University of California Los Angeles Brief Loneliness Scale.

Data were gathered on March 18, 2020, near the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. This study looks at the effects of the developing pandemic on younger participants (18 to 25 years, n = 391) and older participants (60 to 80 years, n = 104). Flourishing levels for older participants were significantly higher (M = 107.96) than for younger participants (M = 97.80). Younger participants scored significantly higher on the ONS4 for anxiety and lower than the older participants for happiness, life satisfaction and having a worthwhile life. Levels of psychological distress (CORE-10) were also significantly lower for older participants (M = 9.06) than for younger participants (M = 14.61). Finally, younger participants scored significantly higher on the Brief UCLA Loneliness Scale (M = 6.05) than older participants (M = 4.64).

From these findings, the Covid-19 pandemic was having a significantly greater effect on younger people in England, less than one week before the UK went into “lockdown”. Scores for both the Younger and Older groups on all the study measures were worse than normative comparisons. The study had no specific measure of Covid-19 anxiety, but nor was one available at the time of the survey.

This study suggests that younger people (18 to 25) may be a more vulnerable group during the Covid-19 pandemic than many may have realized.

As a recent British Psychological Society report concluded, there is a lot of untapped wisdom amongst older groups in society.

This is one of the earliest studies to look at psychological distress before England went into “lockdown.”

Information concerning the long‐term consequences of credit repayment decisions is often not available for flexible credit facilities such as credit cards. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of such information in repayment decisions. A dual mental accounting model of money management predicted that repayments would be influenced by both total cost and loan duration information. Experiment 2 also investigated the role of key economic and psychological factors, including some related to a risk defusing operator model of risk management.

In two questionnaire‐based experiments bank customers (n=241; 300) were presented with credit card and remortgage repayment scenarios. In both studies, total cost and loan duration information were varied in a 2×2 randomised‐groups factorial design.

In both studies, analysis of covariance showed that information on the long‐term consequences of repayment decisions lead to significantly higher levels of repayment. However, in Experiment 2, it was found using hierarchical multiple regression that disposable income, level of education, and the perception of, and worry about, repayment difficulties had larger significant effects on repayment levels.

The effects of long‐term consequence information were interpreted in terms of mental accounting and future‐oriented thinking. The effect of concern with future repayment difficulties suggests that borrowers choose lower repayments to control such risks.

Providing total cost and loan duration information for a range of repayment levels could help borrowers make better repayment decisions.

These novel findings contribute to our understanding of borrowers’ repayment behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of Review of Behavioural Finance entitled “Behavioural finance: the role of psychological factors in financial decisions”.

The authors present a brief outline of the origins of behavioural economics; discuss the role that experimental and survey methods play in the study of financial behaviour; summarise the contributions made by the papers in the issue and consider their implications; and assess why research in behavioural finance is important for finance researchers and practitioners.

The primary input to behavioural finance has been from experimental psychology. Methods developed within sociology such as surveys, interviews, participant observation, focus groups have not had the same degree of influence. Typically, these methods are even more expensive than experimental ones and so costs of using them may be one reason for their lack of impact. However, it is also possible that the training of finance academics leads them to prefer methodologies that permit greater control and a clearer causal interpretation.

The paper shows that interdisciplinary research is becoming more widespread and it is likely that greater collaboration between finance and sociology will develop in the future.