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This study tested an expanded version of the explanatory model of the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health proposed by Milman and colleagues. Participants (N = 680) completed an online survey on demographic variables associated with poor pandemic mental health, COVID-19 stressors, mental health symptoms, and pandemic-related psychological processes we hypothesized as mediating mechanisms explaining the negative mental health effects of the COVID-19 stressors. Results indicated that these psychological processes (core belief violation, meaning made of the pandemic, vulnerability, and mortality perception) explained the severity of mental health symptoms to a far greater extent than COVID-19 stressors and demographics combined. In addition, these psychological processes mediated the impact of COVID-19 stressors on all mental health outcomes. Specifically, COVID-19 stressors were associated with increased core belief violation, decreased meaning making, and more intense perceived vulnerability and mortality. In turn, those whose core beliefs were more violated by the pandemic, who made less meaning of the pandemic, and who perceived a more pronounced vulnerability and mortality experienced a worse mental health condition. This study’s results suggest some possible ways of intervention in pandemic-like events useful for limiting such impact at the individual, group, social and political levels.

The negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health has been extensively documented, while its possible positive impact on the individual, defined as Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG), has been much less investigated. The present study examines the association between PTG and socio-demographic aspects, pre-pandemic psychological adjustment, stressors directly linked to COVID-19 and four psychological factors theoretically implicated in the change processes (core belief violation, meaning-making, vulnerability and mortality perception). During the second wave of the pandemic 680 medical patients completed an online survey on direct and indirect COVID-19 stressors, health and demographic information, post-traumatic growth, core belief violation, meaning-making capacity, feelings of vulnerability and perceptions of personal mortality. Violation of core beliefs, feelings of vulnerability and mortality, and pre-pandemic mental illness positively correlated with post-traumatic growth. Moreover, the diagnosis of COVID-19, stronger violation of core beliefs, greater meaning-making ability, and lower pre-existing mental illness predicted greater PTG. Finally, a moderating effect of meaning-making ability was found. The clinical implications were discussed.

Cognitive science has gathered robust evidence supporting the hypothesis that cognitive processes do not occur in an amodal format but take shape through the activation of the sensorimotor systems of the agent body, which works as simulation system upon which concepts, words, and thought are based. However, studies that have investigated the relationship between language and cognitive processes, as both embedded processes, are very rare. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis that intelligence is associated with referential competence, conceived as the ability to find words to refer to our subjective and perceptual experience, and to evoke understanding of this experience in the listener. We administered the WAIS-IV test to 32 nonclinical subjects and collected autobiographical narratives from them through the Relationship Anecdotes Paradigm Interview. The narratives were analyzed linguistically by applying computerized measures of referential competence. Intelligence scores were found to correlate with the use in narratives of words related to somatic and sensory sensations, while they were not associated with other measures of referential competence related to more abstract domains of experience or based on vivid or reflective dimensions of language style. The results support the hypothesis that sensorimotor schemas have an intrinsic role in language and cognition.

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