Department of International Business and Management, Nottingham University Business School China.
Department of Special Education and Counselling, Education University of Hong Kong.
Am Psychol. 2024 Feb-Mar;79(2):268-284. doi: 10.1037/amp0001188. Epub 2023 Jul 13.
It is a common understanding that the 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) significantly harmed mental health. However, findings on changes in overall life satisfaction have been mixed and inconclusive. To address this puzzling phenomenon, we draw upon the domain-specific perspective of well-being and research on catastrophe compassion and propose that the pandemic can have opposing effects on mental health and communal satisfaction, which then differently relate to people's overall life satisfaction. Longitudinal analyses of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) Survey of Australia ( = 12,093) showed that while there was a greater decrease in mental health in the first COVID-19 pandemic year (2019-2020) than in the previous years (2017-2019), an increase in communal satisfaction also occurred, demonstrating a potential silver lining effect of the pandemic on people's satisfaction with family, community, and neighborhood. Moreover, consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, changes in mental health, communal satisfaction, and life satisfaction were related to age, such that older adults generally reported less harmful and more beneficial psychological changes. We further found that age was associated with stronger associations of mental health and communal satisfaction with life satisfaction during the pandemic year. Overall, our findings speak to the importance of communal life in life satisfaction during the pandemic and age-related differences in the process, shedding light on the need to devise customized support to address inequalities in pandemic effects on public well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
人们普遍认为，2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行对心理健康造成了严重影响。然而，关于总体生活满意度变化的研究结果却存在差异，且没有定论。为了解决这一令人困惑的现象，我们借鉴了幸福感的特定领域视角以及关于灾难同情的研究，并提出大流行可能对心理健康和社区满意度产生相反的影响，而这两种影响又会以不同的方式与人们的整体生活满意度相关。对澳大利亚家庭、收入和劳动力动态（HILDA）调查的纵向分析（n=12093）表明，虽然在 2019-2020 年（即第一次 COVID-19 大流行年）心理健康状况的下降幅度大于 2017-2019 年，但社区满意度也有所上升，这表明大流行对人们对家庭、社区和邻里的满意度可能产生了潜在的积极影响。此外，与社会情绪选择理论一致，心理健康、社区满意度和生活满意度的变化与年龄有关，即老年人通常报告的心理变化的危害较小，益处较大。我们进一步发现，在大流行期间，年龄与心理健康和社区满意度与生活满意度的关联更为密切。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明，在大流行期间，社区生活对生活满意度很重要，且年龄对这一过程存在影响，这凸显了制定有针对性的支持措施来解决大流行对公众幸福感影响不平等问题的必要性。
