Silva Washington Allysson Dantas, Brito Tátila Rayane de Sampaio, Pereira Cicero Roberto
Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil.
Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.
Pers Individ Dif. 2021 Jul;176:110772. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2021.110772. Epub 2021 Feb 12.
Situations of public calamity, such as that caused by COVID-19 pandemic, strongly impact mental health, especially among people who feel most anxious about the imminence of death, as highlighted by the Terror Management Theory. In this research, we investigated how and under which conditions concerns about death itself and anxiety are related to psychological well-being. Specifically, we assessed the role of fear caused by the prominence of death (contextual and dispositional) in anxiety and well-being during the pandemic. Participants were 352 Brazilians, who answered a measurement of fear of death and read a news story about COVID-19. The manipulated news brought the idea of death to prominence (vs. non-prominence). After reading the news, the participants answered scales of anxiety and psychological well-being. The results showed that individual differences in fear of death related to well-being, and that this relationship was mediated by anxiety in face of COVID-19. Contrastingly, the manipulation of the salience of death in the news did not affect this relationship. These results contribute to the understanding of a psychological process related with fluctuations in individuals' well-being during the pandemic, offering insights for future studies that can promote better coping conditions during this period of world crisis.
诸如由新冠疫情引发的公共灾难情况，会对心理健康产生强烈影响，尤其是对那些对死亡临近感到最为焦虑的人，恐怖管理理论强调了这一点。在本研究中，我们调查了对死亡本身的担忧和焦虑如何以及在何种条件下与心理健康相关。具体而言，我们评估了在疫情期间，由死亡凸显（情境性和倾向性）引发的恐惧在焦虑和心理健康中的作用。参与者为352名巴西人，他们回答了一份死亡恐惧量表，并阅读了一篇关于新冠疫情的新闻报道。经过操控的新闻突出了死亡的概念（对比未突出）。阅读新闻后，参与者回答了焦虑和心理健康量表。结果表明，死亡恐惧的个体差异与心理健康相关，并且这种关系由面对新冠疫情时的焦虑介导。相反，新闻中对死亡显著性的操控并未影响这种关系。这些结果有助于理解与疫情期间个体心理健康波动相关的心理过程，为未来研究提供见解，这些研究可促进在此全球危机期间更好的应对条件。
