| Popis: |
Health threats, such as the risk of falling ill, can cause significant distress. While health threats are known to produce anxiety, the psychosocial factors that influence this relationship are understudied, particularly in the context of pandemics. Anxiety may be especially pronounced during pandemics, given their widespread impact on everyday life, the global scale of the health threat, and uncertainty surrounding the temporal parameters of the pandemic, including its duration, the time scale of treatment/vaccine development and availability, and the dynamics of societal recovery. For these reasons, individuals who are intolerant of uncertainty may be especially prone to anxiety during pandemics. These individuals may benefit from appraising and regulating their response to the pandemic in particular ways to manage their distress. The present study aims to examine how these psychosocial factors – intolerance of uncertainty, appraisals, and coping behaviors – impact anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. We will examine multiple stress appraisals (including threat appraisals and both self- and other-focused control appraisals) and two sets of coping strategies -- emotion-focused and problem-focused. This study includes a replication of methods described in Taha et al. (2014), where structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the interaction of these psychosocial factors on anxiety related to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. By replicating their methods and analyses during the current COVID-19 pandemic, we will be able to examine whether the directional associations between these psychosocial factors related to a health threat are stable, or change with contextual differences in the two pandemic events. In addition to the direct replication of Taha et al. (2014), we will explore how aspects of an individual’s personal experiences (such as job loss) during the pandemic relate to the psychosocial factors and anxiety measures. |
