The current situation around coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) portrays a threat to us in several ways: It imposes uncertainty and a lack of control and reminds us of our own mortality. People around the world have reacted to these threats in seemingly unrelated ways: From stockpiling yeast and toilet paper to favoring nationalist ideas or endorsing conspiratorial beliefs. According to the General Process Model of Threat and Defense, the confrontation with a threat-a discrepant experience-makes humans react with both proximal and distal threat responses. While the proximal response manifests in behavioral inhibition that leads to heightened anxious arousal and vigilance, distal responses seek to lower behavioral inhibition and the associated state of anxiety and vigilance through engaging in distal defenses. In the present research, we propose that the reactions to COVID-19 may represent distal defense strategies to the pandemic and, therefore, can be explained and forecasted by the model. Thus, we hypothesized increased perceived COVID-19 threat to lead to a proximal threat response in the form of heightened behavioral inhibition. This, in return, should enhance the use of distal defenses (i.e., several ingroup biases, system justification, and conspiratorial beliefs) overlapping with the reactions observed as a response to COVID-19. This hypothesized mediated effect of increased perceived COVID-19 threat on distal defenses was tested in two preregistered studies: In Study 1 (N = 358), results showed perceived COVID-19 threat to be related to behavioral inhibition and, in turn, to be associated with increased distal defenses (i.e., higher entitativity, control restoration motivation, passive party support). In Study 2 (N = 348), we manipulated COVID-19 threat salience and found results suggesting the distal defenses of ingroup entitativity, system justification, and conspiratorial beliefs to be mediated by the proximal threat response. The results of the present research hint toward a common mechanism through which the seemingly unrelated reactions to COVID-19 can be explained. The results might help to predict future behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and to design measures to counteract the detrimental effects of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted everyday life virtually everywhere in the world, enabling real-life research on threat-and-defense processes. In a survey conducted within the first days of implementing social distancing measures in Austria and Germany, we aimed to explore the pathways from threat perception to preferences of defense strategies. We found that anxiety, approach-related affect, and reactance were specifically elicited by motivational (vs. epistemic) discrepancies. In a second step, we tested the mediating effect of anxiety, approach-related affect, and reactance on preferences regarding personal-social and concrete-abstract defenses. Experiencing anxiety was related to interest in security-related actions, and approach-affect was related to both personal projects and social media use. Participants experiencing reactance were more inclined to pursue personal projects (personal-abstract) and less interested in security-related (personal-concrete) actions. They also showed marginally lower system justification (social-abstract). Additionally, we examined the relationship of loneliness with defense strategies, showing that loneliness was associated with lower system justification and security behaviors. The results suggest that individuals deal with threat in their own ways, mostly depending on affective state and motivational orientation: Anxiety was related to security, approach-state to action (both social and personal), reactance to derogation of the system and disregard for security, while loneliness was associated with inaction.

In this set of studies we explored the influence of the client's affiliation and potential competition on the coach's empathy. We expected that both competition and low affiliation would negatively affect the coach's inner empathy. In three studies we manipulated the coaching client in terms of affiliation and competition. In the first study (N 1 = 198) the participants were asked to coach either an affiliating, competing, or neutral client. In the second study (N 2 = 155) they were asked to coach either a less affiliating, competing, or neutral client. In the third study (N 3 = 52) they coached either a neutral client or a client who was both competing and less affiliating. The results of all three studies revealed that both competition and affiliation influenced the coach's affiliation feelings and inner empathy but not their expressed empathy. We further found that coaches felt less authentic in their behavior and their empathy when coaching a competing and less affiliating client than when coaching a neutral client. The set of studies provides evidence for the client's influence on a coach's empathy with a valuable degree of external validity because a mixed sample, future psychologists, and real coaches were tested. The results of these studies suggest that the coach's expressed empathy does not change dependent on the client. Thus, coaches stay in their professional role. However, staying authentic seems to be difficult when being confronted with a competing and less affiliating client.