Psychological stress of university students in the hardest-hit areas at different stages of the COVID-19 epidemic

BACKGROUND: The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused extremely many serious consequences for the country and the world. In fact, it has seriously affected people's mental health. The purpose of this study is to understand the psychological stress among college students in different stages of epidemics in hard-hit areas such as Hubei. Moreover, to highlight the factors that influencing, their psychological conditions with the emphasis of further corresponding suggestions. METHODS: This study includes self-designed questionnaires in order to assess and analyze the psychological state of over 17,000 college students during the outbreak period in January and home quarantine in February. The questionnaire contains three aspects and six dimensions: pressure responses: stress susceptibility (SS), stress adjustment (SA), risk cognition: cognition of danger (CD), cognition of illness (CI) and stress reactions: emotional responses (ER), somatic responses (SR). This survey was done by an online questionnaire (www.wjx.cn) to investigate the psychological stress information of college students, and analyzed the data by SPSS 22.0 for Windows. RESULTS: Regarding the stress susceptibility, participants were more likely stressed in February than in January. Regarding the stress adjustment, the number of participants requiring pressure regulation or release in the February survey was significantly lower than that the effective in the January survey. The mean of the cognition of danger reduced significantly in February than in January, in other words, participants were highly worried about the epidemic in January than in February. Regarding the cognition of illness, participants in January had a more pessimistic attitude towards the epidemic than those in February. The emotional responses of the participants in February were more severe than those in January, while the somatic responses reduced significantly in February compared with January. Furthermore, females have stronger stress reactions than males. However, the SR doesn’t have significant differences between females and males. CONCLUSION: After two surveys in January and February, it was found that the psychological stress of college students in Hubei was significantly different at different stages of the epidemic, where the epidemic developed, the psychological stress of college students become more severe. The psychological stress of the college students in Hubei Province, as a severely affected area, should be paid more attention.