Highlights First study to examine the contribution of the Big 5 personality traits, health anxiety, and COVID-19 psychological distress to generalised anxiety and depressive symptoms. COVID-19 psychological distress predicts generalised anxiety and depressive symptoms beyond all other variables. Specific personality traits appear to be protective of COVID-19 psychological distress.

Highlights A brief new measure to assess COVID-19 anxiety syndrome features is presented. The measure has acceptable levels of reliability and concurrent validity. The measure was found to predict COVID-19 anxiety and work and social adjustment controlling for other variables.

Over the last twenty years metacognitive theory has provided a novel framework, in the form of the Self-Regulatory Executive Function (S-REF) model, for conceptualizing psychological distress (Wells & Matthews, 1994;1996) Metacognition in Psychopathology: The Self-Regulatory Executive Function ModelThe term 'metacognition', which is most often associated with the work of John Flavell (1979;1987), can be broadly defined as knowledge and cognitive processes that are involved in the appraisal, control, or monitoring of thinking. Theory and research in metacognition emerged in developmental psychology and has, over the last forty years, been applied across various domains including aging, education, forensic psychology, memory, and neuropsychology (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009;Nelson & Narens, 1990;Pintrich, 2000).More recently, as a result of the work of Adrian Wells and his colleagues, metacognition has applied to conceptualizing and treating psychological distress. Wells and Matthews (1994;1996) have proposed a multi-process model, the Self-Regulatory and by the third level in the model: metacognitive knowledge. Metacognitive knowledge is conceptualised as information and beliefs about cognition that are positive and negative in content (e.g. "Worrying will help me cope" and "Some thoughts are dangerous") and

No abstract

No abstract