Coronavirus Anxiety Scale: A brief mental health screener for COVID-19 related anxiety

By Sherman A. Lee. Death Studies, 2020

1,433 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Mental health concerns of people impacted by the coronavirus pandemic have not been adequately addressed. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate the properties of the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS), which is a brief mental health screener to identify probable cases of dysfunctional anxiety associated with the COVID-19 crisis. This 5-item scale, which was based on 775 adults with anxiety over the coronavirus, demonstrated solid reliability and validity. Elevated CAS scores were found to be associated with coronavirus diagnosis, impairment, alcohol/drug coping, negative religious coping, extreme hopelessness, suicidal ideation, as well as attitudes toward President Trump and Chinese products. The CAS discriminates well between persons with and without dysfunctional anxiety using an optimized cut score of ≥ 9 (90% sensitivity and 85% specificity). These results support the CAS as an efficient and valid tool for clinical research and practice.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43f31ea2a3ff214937f93bfbcf015aa272d6bf97

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Student Wellbeing at Universities in the United Kingdom: A Conceptual Analysis (2020, background): “Further to this, over 25% of COVID-19 related videos on YouTube were found to contain nonfactual information totaling over 62,000,000 cumulative views (Li et al., 2020).”
Attitudes towards vaccines and intention to vaccinate against COVID-19: Implications for public health communications (2020, neutral): “The CAS contains five items assessing physical symptoms of anxiety (e.g., “I feel dizzy, lightheaded or faint when I read or listened to news about the coronavirus”).”
Review: Mental health impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on children and youth – a systematic review (2021, methodology): “…using one of the well-validated instruments which have recently emerged to measure COVID19’s mental health impacts, such as the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (S. A. Lee, 2020), CoRonavIruS Health and Impact Survey (CRISIS) (Nikolaidis et al., 2020), or the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (Ahorsu et al., 2020).”
Depression and Anxiety in Hong Kong during COVID-19 (2020, background): “High anxiety during the pandemic is problematic because a recent study found that coronavirus-related anxiety was strongly associated with functional impairments, alcohol or drug coping, negative religious coping, extreme hopelessness, and passive suicidal ideation [24].”
Too afraid to Travel? Development of a Pandemic (COVID-19) Anxiety Travel Scale (PATS) (2021, methodology): “These generic scales provided the basis for the development of the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS; Lee, 2020), a brief 5-item healthcare screener adapted and tested during the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the US.”
Death anxiety in the time of COVID-19: theoretical explanations and clinical implications (2020, result): “These observations are supported by a recent study that found a positive relationship between coronavirus-related anxiety and avoidance of Chinese food and products (Lee, 2020), echoing similar observations of avoidance of Chinese people following the 2003 SARS outbreak (Keil and Ali, 2006).”
The COVID-19 anxiety syndrome scale: Development and psychometric properties (2020, positive): “There may well be many individuals who will find it difficult to return to full ‘societal’ engagement because of maladaptive forms of coping that will have exacerbated COVID-19 anxiety (Lee, 2020b).”
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Tourists’ COVID-19 Risk Perception and Vacation Behavior Shift (2021, background): “It is found that tourists from the United States, Hong Kong and Australia take travel risk very seriously, but for tourists from Greece, Canada and the United Kingdom, risk plays a minor role in travel behavior [30,65].”