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Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK

During the COVID-19 pandemic, exposure to COVID-related stimuli, has been enormous. Exposure to threat-related stimuli, can have a significant impact on people's wellbeing particularly in relation to COVID-related anxiety. The present research comprises two empirical studies. In Study 1, a newl...

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Autores principales: Ypsilanti, Antonia, Mullings, Emma, Hawkins, Oliver, Lazuras, Lambros
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier B.V. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8407941/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34706409
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.08.031
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author Ypsilanti, Antonia
Mullings, Emma
Hawkins, Oliver
Lazuras, Lambros
author_facet Ypsilanti, Antonia
Mullings, Emma
Hawkins, Oliver
Lazuras, Lambros
author_sort Ypsilanti, Antonia
collection PubMed
description During the COVID-19 pandemic, exposure to COVID-related stimuli, has been enormous. Exposure to threat-related stimuli, can have a significant impact on people's wellbeing particularly in relation to COVID-related anxiety. The present research comprises two empirical studies. In Study 1, a newly developed Emotional Stroop Task (EST) and an Image Rating Task (IRT) were used to assess, automatic and non-automatic affective responses to COVID-related words and images during the first wave of the pandemic in the UK general population. In Study 2, the same tasks were used to evaluate the affective responses of University students during the second wave of the pandemic. Additionally, loneliness and pro-social behaviours were explored in relation COVID-related anxiety in the same population. Overall, the results showed that automatic affective responses as measured by interference effects on the EST, remained unaffected during the pandemic. However, non-automatic affective responses to COVID-related images measured by the IRT, indicated that participants rated these images as more fearful sadder and higher in anger, compared to non-COVID negative images matched for arousal and negativity and this was more evident in people with high COVID-anxiety. Trait anxiety was related to higher levels of loneliness, more prosocial behaviour and higher intentions to help others, while COVID-related anxiety mediated these effects, suggesting that for high levels of trait anxiety, participants were more likely to have helped someone in need during the pandemic when their COVID-anxiety levels were low.
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spelling pubmed-84079412021-09-01 Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK Ypsilanti, Antonia Mullings, Emma Hawkins, Oliver Lazuras, Lambros J Affect Disord Research Paper During the COVID-19 pandemic, exposure to COVID-related stimuli, has been enormous. Exposure to threat-related stimuli, can have a significant impact on people's wellbeing particularly in relation to COVID-related anxiety. The present research comprises two empirical studies. In Study 1, a newly developed Emotional Stroop Task (EST) and an Image Rating Task (IRT) were used to assess, automatic and non-automatic affective responses to COVID-related words and images during the first wave of the pandemic in the UK general population. In Study 2, the same tasks were used to evaluate the affective responses of University students during the second wave of the pandemic. Additionally, loneliness and pro-social behaviours were explored in relation COVID-related anxiety in the same population. Overall, the results showed that automatic affective responses as measured by interference effects on the EST, remained unaffected during the pandemic. However, non-automatic affective responses to COVID-related images measured by the IRT, indicated that participants rated these images as more fearful sadder and higher in anger, compared to non-COVID negative images matched for arousal and negativity and this was more evident in people with high COVID-anxiety. Trait anxiety was related to higher levels of loneliness, more prosocial behaviour and higher intentions to help others, while COVID-related anxiety mediated these effects, suggesting that for high levels of trait anxiety, participants were more likely to have helped someone in need during the pandemic when their COVID-anxiety levels were low. Elsevier B.V. 2021-12-01 2021-09-01 /pmc/articles/PMC8407941/ /pubmed/34706409 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.08.031 Text en © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Research Paper
Ypsilanti, Antonia
Mullings, Emma
Hawkins, Oliver
Lazuras, Lambros
Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK
title Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK
title_full Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK
title_fullStr Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK
title_full_unstemmed Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK
title_short Feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two studies in the UK
title_sort feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness during the covid-19 pandemic: findings from two studies in the uk
topic Research Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8407941/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34706409
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.08.031
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