How perceived risk influences college students' preventive behavior: Novel data of COVID-19 campus lockdown from Wuhan, China

Abstract

Following preventive behaviors is a key measure to protect people from infectious diseases. Protection motivation theory (PMT) suggests that perceived risk motivates individuals to take protective measures. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented stress to the public, and changes in perceived risk may be more pronounced among college students than among other groups due to the related campus lockdown. With 1,119 college students recruited as research subjects, a quantitative research was conducted in Wuhan, China, to deduce the relationship between the perceived risk and preventive behavior of college students, as well as between the mediation effect of individual affect and the moderating effect of physical exercise. The results showed that the preventive behavior of college students was significantly affected by perceived risk, and both positive affect and negative affect played a mediating role between perceived risk and preventive behavior. Specifically, positive affect aided the relationship between perceived risk and preventive behavior, negative affect was detrimental to their relationship, and the mediation effect of positive affect is significantly higher than that of negative affect. Furthermore, physical exercise played a moderating role in the mediation effects of positive affect and negative affect. Therefore, appropriate measures should be taken to strengthen Chinese college students' perceived risk and provide them with corresponding guidance. The importance of physical exercise should also be emphasized to help college students with low perceived risk reduce negative affect, increase positive affect, and promote their preventive behavior.

Impact of campus living conditions on Chinese medical school students’ mental health during the COVID-19 campus lockdown: the chain mediating role of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression

“…These precautions have been called the “new normal” in the US and “regular measures implemented to control epidemic” in China ( 3 , 4 ). Because of the continuing mutation, shorter incubation period, and higher rates of asymptomatic infection, the pandemic situation became more pressing in the first half of 2022, and some colleges and universities in China had to adopt a 1–3-month campus lockdown policy (or “static management”) in response to local COVID-19 outbreaks ( 5 ). Accordingly, to cope with this situation, different degrees of campus lockdown measures were adopted to set clear boundaries between areas on and off campus and separate internal and external personnel ( 6 ).…”