Anxiety responses to the unfolding COVID-19 crisis: Patterns of change in the experience of prolonged exposure to stressors.

Abstract

An immense amount of work has investigated how adverse situations affect anxiety using chronic (i.e., average) or episodic conceptualizations. However, less attention has been paid to circumstances that unfold continuously over time, inhibiting theoretical testing and leading to possible erroneous conclusions about how stressors are dynamically appraised across time. Because stressor novelty, predictability, and patterns are central components of appraisal theories, we use the COVID-19 crisis as a context to illustrate how variation in the phenomenon’s patterns of change (specifically, total cases [average level] but also the rate of linear [velocity] and nonlinear growth [acceleration] in cases) influence anxiety. We also show the implications of anxiety for next-day functioning at work. These effects are tested in data drawn from a sample of employed adults in a daily diary study conducted in four overlapping waves. The data span the emergence, exponential rise, and initial tapering of the virus in the United States (February 10, 2020 to April 28, 2020). Our results show that although the impact of level of COVID-19 cases on anxiety decreases over time, the effect of change in cases (velocity and acceleration) increases over time. Anxiety is then associated with next-day work functioning (engagement, performance, and emotional exhaustion).

Through the Second Wave: Analysis of the Psychological and Perceptive Changes in the Italian Population during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…In particular, risk propension seemed to have increased in the comparison between the first and the second wave (GRISP: 26.93 in the first wave, 27.84 in the second). These results might suggest a habituation dynamic, in which a perpetual exposure to a risk tends to decrease the anxiety of people towards the risk [44,45], thus making people more inclined to take risks [46][47][48]. This can happen even when risk perception appears to have increased (Wilson probability: 6.68 in the first wave, 8.06 in the second), as habituation can be mediated by other factors like increased self-efficacy or locus of control [49,50].…”

Reverse mentoring, job crafting and work-outcomes: the mediating role of work engagement

“…A multilevel confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on Amos 22.0 (Arbuckle, 2016) to assess the fit of our measurement model (Byrne, 2001; Fu et al , 2020). The analysis indicate that the five-factor model (proposed) fits reasonably well to the data with the RMSEA, relative chi-square and the CFI satisfying their criteria of <0.07 (MacCallum et al , 1996), <3 (Kline, 1998) and >0.90 (Awang, 2015), respectively, and NFI and GFI were >0.80 (Forza and Filippini, 1998).…”

Adaptive Managers as Emerging Leaders During the COVID-19 Crisis

“…Numerous studies have attempted to examine the impact of such a pandemic on the workplace and the employees (e.g., Caldas et al, 2020;Trougakos et al, 2020). For instance, a recent study by Fu et al (2021) found that the anxiety levels of the employees are affected by the reported number of COVID-19 cases and the acceleration and velocity at which the reported number is changing, thus affecting the employees' work functioning (engagement, performance, and emotional exhaustion). However, fewer studies have looked at what constitutes effective leadership in the workplace during such a crisis and its potential antecedents (e.g., Hu et al, 2020;Yuan et al, 2021).…”