Functional Fear Predicts Public Health Compliance in the COVID-19 Pandemic
By C. Harper, L. Satchell, D. Fido, Robert D. Latzman. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 2020
1,315 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In the current context of the global pandemic of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), health professionals are working with social scientists to inform government policy on how to slow the spread of the virus. An increasing amount of social scientific research has looked at the role of public message framing, for instance, but few studies have thus far examined the role of individual differences in emotional and personality-based variables in predicting virus-mitigating behaviors. In this study, we recruited a large international community sample ( N = 324) to complete measures of self-perceived risk of contracting COVID-19, fear of the virus, moral foundations, political orientation, and behavior change in response to the pandemic. Consistently, the only predictor of positive behavior change (e.g., social distancing, improved hand hygiene) was fear of COVID-19, with no effect of politically relevant variables. We discuss these data in relation to the potentially functional nature of fear in global health crises.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/178da76eeed03d0a438832f641f15e936216197c
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Citations in the corpus
- Psychological impact of covid-19 crises on students through the lens of Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model (2020, background): “The psychological influence of health threats on human behavior is well explained in the field of Health belief theories (Haefner & Kirscht, 1970; Hochbaum, 1958; Maiman & Becker, 1974; Mukhtar, 2020; Prentice-Dunn & Rogers, 1986; Rosenstock et al., 1988, 1994) where behavioral changes are said to…”
- Race and ethnicity, gender, and age on perceived threats and fear of COVID-19: Evidence from two national data sources (2020, neutral): “…& Wong, 2003), disinfection of home dwellings (Lau, Yang, Tsui, & Kim, 2003; Rubin, Aml ˆ ot, Page, & Wessely, 2009; Wong & Tang, 2005), and handwashing (Brug et al., 2004; Harper, Satchell, Fido, & Latzman, 2020; Jones & Salathe, 2009; Tang & Wong, 2003; Wise, Zbozinek, Michelini, & Hagan, 2020).”
- High Boredom Proneness and Low Trait Self-Control Impair Adherence to Social Distancing Guidelines during the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “In December 2019, a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was discovered.”
- The Role of Personality in COVID-19-Related Perceptions, Evaluations, and Behaviors: Findings Across Five Samples, Nine Traits, and 17 Criteria (2021, result): “As a general limitation, we administered self-reports only; however, there is evidence that self-reported and observations of actual behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic overlap (Gollwitzer et al., 2020).”
- Grocery Shopping Preferences during the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Like [32], we hypothesize that the change in consumer behavior is driven partly by feelings of fear toward the virus.”
- Fear of COVID-19 and Positivity: Mediating Role of Intolerance of Uncertainty, Depression, Anxiety, and Stress (2020, background): “In the study of Harper et al. (2020), positive relationships were found between depression, anxiety, and fear of COVID-19.”
- Psychometric Properties of the Greek Version of FCV-19S (2020, background): “Meanwhile, a recent research proposed that the perceived fear against COVID-19, assessed by the FCV-19S, functions mainly as a protective factor that leads to better adjustment against the pandemic and predicts compliance with the preventive measures (Harper et al. 2020).”