Life satisfaction and happiness in patients shielding from the COVID-19 global pandemic: A randomised controlled study of the ‘mood as information’ theory

Alice O’Donnell; Lydia Wilson; Jos A. Bosch; Richard Borrows

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0243278

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 13, 2020
21 Sep 2020 Decision Letter - Itamar Ashkenazi, Editor Transfer Alert This paper was transferred from another journal. As a result, its full editorial history (including decision letters, peer reviews and author responses) may not be present. PONE-D-20-25329 Life Satisfaction and Happiness in Patients Shielding from the COVID-19 Global Pandemic: A Randomised controlled study of the ‘Mood as Information’ Theory PLOS ONE Dear Dr. O'Donnell, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. The recommendations for changes are attached below. As you will see these are minor. Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 05 2020 11:59PM. 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We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. 5. Your ethics statement should only appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please delete it from any other section. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Title: Life satisfaction and happiness in patients shielding from the COVID-19 Global Pandemic: A randomized controlled study of the ‘Mood as Information’ Theory Study type: prospective randomized survey Authors’ methodology and main results: The authors interviewed by telephone 200 kidney transplant patients shielding from COVID-19. They evaluated the effect of priming, as suggested by Schwarz and Clore’s study, on happiness and life satisfaction. Differences in happiness and satisfaction were noticed between those who were primed and those who were not. Reviewer’s comments: I enjoyed reading this article. It asked a simple question and provided a simple answer. The discussion provides possible implications of priming on life satisfaction and happiness of our patients. I therefore recommend accepting this study for publication. There are several minor issues that need to be addressed. 1. Results are repeated three times: within the text, in a table form and in a figure. This is unnecessary. I personally would prefer showing figure 1. The description within the text can then be shortened as follows: A summary of the results of the 4 questions in the primed and no-primed groups can be seen in Figure 1. The answers to all questions across the groups were normally distributed. Differences observed between the two groups in overall happiness (t198=3.77; p=0.0002), desire to change (t198=3.78; p=0.0002), satisfaction with life as a whole (t198=3.93; p=0.0001) and happiness in this moment (t198=2.08; p=0.04) were all significant. 2. In figure 1, the authors provide the standard error. The authors should have drawn the standard deviation instead. Using the stars system with explanation provided just below the graph, the readers can understand which differences between columns were significant: * <0.05; <0.01; * <0.001. ******** 6. 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PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243278.r001
Revision 1
3 Nov 2020 Author Response Response to reviewers: Dear Reviewers, Thank you for your correspondence and for considering our study for publication. We are delighted that you agree our study holds merit and have provided us with such helpful comments. As a group we have met and discussed your comments in detail and worked through them in depth, hopefully addressing each point. We have revised the manuscript accordingly and would like to resubmit the revised version for your consideration. Below we have written our response to each of the comments provided. Thank you again for your helpful comments and we look forward to hearing from you soon. Journal requirements Set 1: 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf Thank you for clarifying the style requirements PLOS ONE requires. In response to this comment we have altered the formatting to ensure that it complies with your requirements. We hope this satisfies your request. 2. Thank you for stating the following in the Funding Section of your manuscript: "This work was funded by the renal department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. This research was independent from external funders." We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: "No. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Thank you for this point. In reply to this, we have removed the funding statements from within the text. Please update our funding statement to the following: ‘This work was funded by the renal department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. This research was independent from external funders’. In addition, our cover letter now says: ‘This work was funded by the renal department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. This research was independent from external funders’. We hope this is satisfactory and meets your request. 3. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially identifying or sensitive patient information) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. Thank you very much for this comment. Due to ethical restrictions we are unable to share this de-identified data set, with our data containing sensitive patient information. This is inline with the CARMS (Clinical Audit & Registration management System) ethics committee at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The CARMS committee are in charge of organising the ethics that a project must follow, and set out that for this project we must not share de-identified patient data set, given the sensitive nature of this study. To contact the CARMS department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, you can email clinicalaudit@uhb.nhs.uk . We have included details of this in the cover letter, as requested. We are happy that all relevant data is within the manuscript we have resubmitted. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. Please see http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c181.long for guidelines on how to de-identify and prepare clinical data for publication. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. 4. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. Thank you for pointing this out and we fully appreciate this comment. In response to this, we believe it simpler to simply state the lack of difference in these parameters (as one would expect in a randomised study) rather than subsume the reader in unnecessary data, either in the article itself or supplementary. This was agreed between all authors to be the best approach, and we hope this meets with your approval. We have removed the phrase “data not shown” that relates to this data in response to your comment. 5. Your ethics statement should only appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please delete it from any other section. We thank you for clarifying this for us. We have now only included an ethical statement in the methods section of our paper. Set 2 1. Results are repeated three times: within the text, in a table form and in a figure. This is unnecessary. I personally would prefer showing figure 1. The description within the text can then be shortened as follows: A summary of the results of the 4 questions in the primed and no-primed groups can be seen in Figure 1. The answers to all questions across the groups were normally distributed. Differences observed between the two groups in overall happiness (t198=3.77; p=0.0002), desire to change (t198=3.78; p=0.0002), satisfaction with life as a whole (t198=3.93; p=0.0001) and happiness in this moment (t198=2.08; p=0.04) were all significant. Thank you very much for this comment. We have replaced the summary of the results to comply with the above recommendation. Thank you again for this suggestion. 2. In figure 1, the authors provide the standard error. The authors should have drawn the standard deviation instead. Using the stars system with explanation provided just below the graph, the readers can understand which differences between columns were significant: * <0.05; <0.01; * <0.001. Thank you very much for this comment. Figure 1 has been changed to reflect the standard deviation rather than the standard error. This figure has replaced the previous figure and we hope you are happy with this change. 3. While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. Thank you for notifying us about this tool, we have now uploaded the files to PACE. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243278.r002
19 Nov 2020 Decision Letter - Itamar Ashkenazi, Editor Life Satisfaction and Happiness in Patients Shielding from the COVID-19 Global Pandemic: A Randomised controlled study of the ‘Mood as Information’ Theory PONE-D-20-25329R1 Dear Dr. O'Donnell, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Itamar Ashkenazi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243278.r003
Formally Accepted
24 Nov 2020 Acceptance Letter - Itamar Ashkenazi, Editor PONE-D-20-25329R1 Life Satisfaction and Happiness in Patients Shielding from the COVID-19 Global Pandemic: A Randomised controlled study of the ‘Mood as Information’ Theory Dear Dr. O'Donnell: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Itamar Ashkenazi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243278.r004

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