Covid-19 pandemic has polarized the society toward negative and positive traits depending on a person’s resilience and certain predispositions

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a major disruption affecting almost all aspects of health, social and economic dimensions of our lives on an almost unprecedented global scale. While Covid-19 itself is, first and foremost, a pernicious physical illness, its highly contagious nature has caused significant psychological stress with occasional dire mental health consequences which are still not fully understood. To address this issue, we have conducted a longitudinal study by administering standard self-reporting questionnaires covering five major personalities and six mental traits of subjects before and a few months after the outbreak. Results revealed the distribution of population scores to become more extreme in either positive or negative trait directions despite the stability of average trait scores across the population. Higher resilience was found to be positively correlated with improved trait scores post-pandemic. Further investigations showed that certain predispositions could have an effect on trait score change post-Covid depending on the subject's pre-Covid scores. In particular, in the subjects with moderate scores, there was a significant negative correlation between the positive trait scores and the post minus pre-positive trait scores. By examining various traits and personalities, these findings depict a more thorough picture of the pandemic's impact on society's psychological well-being and reveal certain predispositions and vulnerabilities that shape the mental health landscape in the post-Covid period with implications for mental health policies in dealing with Covid-19.