No abstract

No abstract

Background:The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted the lives of people globally, and the significant mental health consequences of this pandemic are beginning to be documented. In addition to sociodemographic and COVID-19 specific factors, psychological risk and protective mechanisms likely influence individual differences in mental health symptoms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined associations between a broad set of risk and protective factors with symptoms of depression, anxiety, alcohol problems, and eating pathology, and investigated interactions between objective stress due to COVID-19 and risk/protective variables in predicting psychopathology. Methods: Participants were 877 adults (73.7% female) recruited via internet sources from around the globe, but primarily residing in North America (87.4%). Results: Structural equation modelling revealed that certain risk and protective factors (e.g., loneliness, latent protective factor, mindfulness) were broadly related to psychopathology, whereas others showed unique relations with specific forms of psychopathology (e.g., greater repetitive thinking and anxiety; low meaning and purpose and depression). COVID-19 objective stress interacted with risk factors, but not protective factors, to predict greater anxiety symptoms, but not other forms of psychopathology.Limitations: This is a cross-sectional study of non-randomly recruited participants who reported high levels of income and education. Rates of problematic alcohol use were low. Conclusions: Findings contribute to our understanding of psychological mechanisms underlying individual differences in psychopathology in the context of a global stressor. Strategies that reduce loneliness and increase mindfulness will likely impact the greatest number of mental health symptoms.

Objective: Eating disorders and borderline personality disorder have high rates of comorbidity. However, the extent to which individual BPD symptoms are elevated in patients with EDs is largely unknown. Meta-analyses examined: (1) which of the nine BPD symptoms are especially elevated in individuals with versus without EDs,(2) whether particular ED subtypes have elevated levels of certain BPD symptoms, and (3) which BPD symptoms remain unstudied/understudied in relation to EDs. Methods:We performed nine separate meta-analyses (one for each BPD symptom) to compare levels of symptoms in patients with EDs versus healthy controls. A total of 122 studies (range = 4-34 studies across symptoms) were included.Results: Affective instability was the BPD symptom most elevated, while anger was the BPD symptom least elevated, in patients with EDs compared to controls. When comparing effect sizes across ED subtypes, anorexia nervosa binge-eating/purging subtype had the largest effect sizes for the greatest number of BPD symptoms, while effect sizes for AN restrictive subtype were not significantly larger than those of other EDs for any BPD symptom. The least studied BPD symptoms were identity disturbance and interpersonal difficulties.Discussion: These meta-analyses suggest that certain symptoms of BPD play a more prominent role in the comorbidity between BPD and EDs than others. Targeting affective instability when treating cases of comorbid ED and BPD may be especially likely to ameliorate the negative outcomes related to this comorbidity. Future research should further investigate identity disturbance and interpersonal difficulties in the context of EDs.