Firstly, it provides insights into how individuals deal with aspects relating to stress, fear and anxiety during serious life events. The importance of understanding phycological factors is twofold. While one would understand that aspects such as reducing transmission and further outbreaks are critical in the early stages of such pandemics, psychological and mental health requirements should not be neglected. However, most healthcare agencies neglect or underestimate the importance of allocating resources devoted to pandemic-related emotional aspects (e.g., anxiety, fear, stress). Taylor opines that many healthcare resources are made available during pandemics, including the development and distribution of vaccines and testing and information centres. Despite this, adequate solutions to manage or diminish pandemics’ impact on mental health and well-being are still under-researched and not considered as important as physical health. In the case of a pandemic, both the spread of the disease and the manifestation of emotional distress and social disorder throughout and after the event directly affects the population.
Research has shown that individuals’ psychological responses during serious life events, such as a war or pandemic, play a critical role in shaping its outcome.
The impact of the pandemic affected everyone in some way. Countries such as the United States of America, Brazil, France, Spain, Netherlands, Czechia, Slovenia, and Sweden were some of the worst affected when considering the total number of cases per 1 million population. As of August 2021, 199 million global cases and 4.2 million deaths have been reported. Since the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 causing the related disease, hereafter COVID-19, as a pandemic, the aftermath is still being experienced. March 11 th, 2020 marked the date that changed the lives of millions of individuals globally. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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įunding: This work was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund provided by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The data are available at. Received: SeptemAccepted: JanuPublished: January 28, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Meyer et al. PLoS ONE 17(1):Įditor: Andrea Fronzetti Colladon, Universita degli Studi di Perugia, ITALY On this basis, implications for research and practice are provided.Ĭitation: Meyer N, Niemand T, Davila A, Kraus S (2022) Biting the bullet: When self-efficacy mediates the stressful effects of COVID-19 beliefs. Overall, reinforcing self-efficacy was carved out as the most important resilience factor against perceiving high levels of stress. This finding gives reason to believe that individuals may disclose that they are less vulnerable to COVID-19, fostering their self-efficacy, but still accept that stressing factors such as economic and social consequences apply. Only perceived invulnerability elicited opposite effects on stress, increasing stress directly but decreasing stress indirectly by increasing self-efficacy. Except for information seeking, which positively affected perceived stress, self-efficacy partially mediates all other COVID-19 related beliefs (perceptions of disruption, health importance and response effectiveness) in conjunction with their direct effects. It is found that stress perception is most strongly affected by self-efficacy and perceived disruption.
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After conducting a series of tests and checks via Confirmatory Factor Analyses, linear modelling and mediation analyses with bootstrapping were applied to test direct and mediation hypotheses. From a large sample of 23,629, data were assessed using validated multi-item measures for seven COVID-19 related beliefs, self-efficacy and perceived stress. Our study aims to determine if the various COVID-19 related beliefs (information seeking invulnerability disruption health importance and response effectiveness) are predictors of perceived stress and if self-efficacy acts as a mediator in reducing perceived COVID-19 related stress. The impact that COVID-19 had on individuals globally has been immense.
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