Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the response of governments to mitigate the pandemic's spread, resulted in exceptional circumstances that comprised a major global stressor, with broad implications for mental health. We aimed to delineate anxiety trajectories over three time-points in the first 6 months of the pandemic and identify baseline risk and resilience factors that predicted anxiety trajectories. Within weeks of the pandemic onset, we established a website (covid19resilience.org), and enrolled 1362 participants (n = 1064 from US; n = 222 from Israel) who provided longitudinal data between April–September 2020. We used latent growth mixture modelling to identify anxiety trajectories and ran multivariate regression models to compare characteristics between trajectory classes. A four-class model best fit the data, including a resilient trajectory (stable low anxiety) the most common (n = 961, 75.08%), and chronic anxiety (n = 149, 11.64%), recovery (n = 96, 7.50%) and delayed anxiety (n = 74, 5.78%) trajectories. Resilient participants were older, not living alone, with higher income, more education, and reported fewer COVID-19 worries and better sleep quality. Higher resilience factors' scores, specifically greater emotion regulation and lower conflict relationships, also uniquely distinguished the resilient trajectory. Results are consistent with the pre-pandemic resilience literature suggesting that most individuals show stable mental health in the face of stressful events. Findings can inform preventative interventions for improved mental health.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 927-939 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Stress and Health |
Volume | 39 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 7 Feb 2023 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Funding
We thank participants of covid19resilience.org for their contribution to data generation. Ran Barzilay was supported by NIH grant K23MH-120437, the Binational Science Foundation (BSF, grant 2017369) and the Lifespan Brain Institute of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.Ruben C. Gur was suported by NIH grant R01MH-117014. Rebecca E. Waller was support by institutional funding from the University of Pennsylvania. The funding organisation had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication. This study was funded by the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Grant No. 7212103) and National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Nos. 2022YFA1303500-003).
Funders | Funder number |
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Lifespan Brain Institute of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia | |
Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.Ruben | R01MH-117014 |
National Institutes of Health | K23MH-120437 |
University of Pennsylvania | |
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation | 2017369 |
Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission | 7212103 |
National Key Research and Development Program of China | 2022YFA1303500-003 |
Keywords
- COVID-19
- LGMM
- anxiety
- resilience
- risk