Psycho-social factors associated with mental resilience in the Corona lockdown

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only a threat to physical health but is also having severe impacts on mental health. While increases in stress-related symptomatology and other adverse psycho-social outcomes as well as their most important risk factors have been described, hardly anything is known about potential protective factors. Resilience refers to the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. In order to gain mechanistic insights about the relationship between described psycho-social resilience factors and resilience specifically in the current crisis, we assessed resilience factors, exposure to Corona crisis-specific and general stressors, as well as internalizing symptoms in a cross-sectional online survey conducted in 24 languages during the most intense phase of the lockdown in Europe (March 22nd to April 19th) in a convenience sample of N=15,970 adults. Resilience, as an outcome, was conceptualized as good mental health despite stressor exposure and measured as the inverse residual between actual and predicted symptom total score. Preregistered hypotheses (osf.io/r6btn) were tested with multiple regression models and mediation analyses. Results confirmed our primary hypothesis that positive appraisal style (PAS) is positively associated with resilience (p<0.0001). The resilience factor PAS also partly mediated the positive association between perceived social support and resilience, and its association with resilience was in turn partly mediated by the ability to easily recover from stress (both p<0.0001). In comparison with other resilience factors, good stress response recovery and positive appraisal specifically of the consequences of the Corona crisis were the strongest factors. Preregistered exploratory subgroup analyses (osf.io/thka9) showed that all tested resilience factors generalize across major socio-demographic categories. This research identifies modifiable protective factors that can be targeted by public mental health efforts in this and in future pandemics.

Associations between COVID-19 related media consumption and symptoms of anxiety, depression and COVID-19 related fear in the general population in Germany

“…In addition, the present study further demonstrates that not only the frequency but also-and even stronger-the daily duration as well as the diversity of media exposure are significantly positively correlated with global symptom severity and therefore emphasize the meaning of mental distress associated with COVID-19 media coverage, particularly once a "critical load" has been reached. This conclusion is supported by both a recent study that turned out media coverage as one of the strongest emotional stressors in the context of the current pandemic [17] and the data of the present trial. Although it is not clear if psychological strain is rather a consequence or a cause of more immoderate media exploitation, we found the frequency and the duration of COVID-19 related media exposure to be positively correlated with the subjective need for its reduction due to a substantial amount of topic-induced stress.…”

“…Former trials reported about significant psychological strain or distinct mental conditions resulting from crisis-related media coverage [13][14][15] and individual vulnerability was suspected to account significantly for this risk [16]. In the context of the current pandemic, up-to-date data also suggest that topic-specific media reporting results in a high level of stress in the vast majority of people [17]. However, we are aware of only one study that addressed the influence of COVID-19 related media exposure on stress-related mental symptoms so far.…”

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Psychological Distress, Physical Activity, and Symptom Severity in Parkinson’s Disease

“…The most vulnerable patients in our study, i.e., those with the highest levels of psychological distress, were people with lower baseline cognitive abilities and increased neuropsychiatric symptoms at baseline (i.e., collected before the COVID-19 pandemic), as well as low (perceived) social support and specific personality characteristics such as low trait resilience, low optimism, and high neuroticism. This is in line with previous studies in healthy people [ 28, 38, 39 ]. Longitudinal follow-up of our cohort might reveal which factors remain correlated with changes in psychological distress over time.…”

“…Data were loaded into IBM SPSS Statistics 23 to calculate sum-scores for the validated scales and to perform statistical testing. Positive appraisal and behavioral coping were calculated as described by Veer et al (2020) [28]: positive appraisal included the average of all 12 CERQ item scores and the 2 humor sub scores of COPE, for behavioral coping we took the average of the remaining 8 COPE items [28]. First, we conducted Pearson correlation analyses among cumulative stressor load, PSS and MDS-UPDRS-self, prior to performing a mediation analysis.…”

Vertrauen der Bevölkerung in staatliche Institutionen im ersten Halbjahr der Coronapandemie: Erkenntnisse aus dem Projekt COVID-19 Snapshot Monitoring (COSMO)

“…Auch wenn hier die Kausalrichtung nicht festzustellen ist, können Personen mit einer hohen affektiven Risikowahrnehmung als eine wichtige Zielgruppe identifiziert werden, da sie offensichtlich gut durch die Gesundheitsbehörden erreichbar sind. So sollten Behörden diesen nicht nur konkrete Handlungsempfehlungen zur Risikoreduktion anbieten, sondern auch Informationen zur Bewältigung eventueller psychologischer Belastungen, die bei Personen mit hoher affektiver Risikowahrnehmung ebenfalls höher sind [ 22 ].…”