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Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role?
OBJECTIVE: The lockdown measures following the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, intended to slow the spread of the virus, forced a sudden and dramatic change to most everyday lives. However, not all individuals may have been affected in the same way. In addition to situational factors such as occupa...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Ltd.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9756788/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33799202 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113859 |
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author | Schmiedeberg, Claudia Thönnissen, Carolin |
author_facet | Schmiedeberg, Claudia Thönnissen, Carolin |
author_sort | Schmiedeberg, Claudia |
collection | PubMed |
description | OBJECTIVE: The lockdown measures following the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, intended to slow the spread of the virus, forced a sudden and dramatic change to most everyday lives. However, not all individuals may have been affected in the same way. In addition to situational factors such as occupation, family status, and health, personality traits may affect how individuals experienced the initial crisis. METHODS: Using data from the pairfam COVID-19 survey, an online survey of the participants of the German Family Panel pairfam conducted from May to July 2020, as well as personality data from the pairfam panel data, this study analyzes whether the Big Five personality traits influence the degree to which young and middle-aged individuals (16–49 years old) felt negatively affected by and were able to see any benefits of the initial COVID-19 lockdown in Germany. RESULTS: While neuroticism is linked to a more negative perception of the restrictions to daily life, openness to experiences is associated with more positive perceptions of the situation. Like neuroticism, extraversion is also associated with a more negative perception, but only among respondents without a partner. For respondents with a romantic partner, no association was found. CONCLUSION: Results confirm that personality plays a role in individual perceptions of the pandemic situation. Moreover, they show that most individuals perceived not only negative but also positive aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic situation in 2020. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9756788 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Elsevier Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-97567882022-12-16 Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role? Schmiedeberg, Claudia Thönnissen, Carolin Soc Sci Med Article OBJECTIVE: The lockdown measures following the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, intended to slow the spread of the virus, forced a sudden and dramatic change to most everyday lives. However, not all individuals may have been affected in the same way. In addition to situational factors such as occupation, family status, and health, personality traits may affect how individuals experienced the initial crisis. METHODS: Using data from the pairfam COVID-19 survey, an online survey of the participants of the German Family Panel pairfam conducted from May to July 2020, as well as personality data from the pairfam panel data, this study analyzes whether the Big Five personality traits influence the degree to which young and middle-aged individuals (16–49 years old) felt negatively affected by and were able to see any benefits of the initial COVID-19 lockdown in Germany. RESULTS: While neuroticism is linked to a more negative perception of the restrictions to daily life, openness to experiences is associated with more positive perceptions of the situation. Like neuroticism, extraversion is also associated with a more negative perception, but only among respondents without a partner. For respondents with a romantic partner, no association was found. CONCLUSION: Results confirm that personality plays a role in individual perceptions of the pandemic situation. Moreover, they show that most individuals perceived not only negative but also positive aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic situation in 2020. Elsevier Ltd. 2021-05 2021-03-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9756788/ /pubmed/33799202 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113859 Text en © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. 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 | Article Schmiedeberg, Claudia Thönnissen, Carolin Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role? |
title | Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role? |
title_full | Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role? |
title_fullStr | Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role? |
title_full_unstemmed | Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role? |
title_short | Positive and negative perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: Does personality play a role? |
title_sort | positive and negative perceptions of the covid-19 pandemic: does personality play a role? |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9756788/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33799202 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113859 |
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