5.8 Focus on Psychological Research – Emotional and Psychological Impacts of Pandemics

What matters most – exposure to disease, interpretation of risk, or support?

Although most previous pandemics pre-dated sophisticated psychological research, COVID-19 allowed an opportunity to evaluate contagion, perceptions and anxieties about infection, and mitigating psychological variables (e.g., social support) as they unfolded over time.  Kaniasty and van der Meulen (2024) did just that. They evaluated a sample 1245 adults at 3 time points from 2021 through 2022 with respect to direct exposure to COVID-19, COVID-19 related stressors (i.e., decline in household budget, irreversible cancellation of important personal events, postponement of important events, new/additional burdens with care for children, new/additional burdens with care of elderly), and perceived threats from COVID-19 (i.e., fears and concerns
regarding current physical and health threats associated with the continuing pandemic).  They also assessed the quantity of social support efforts offered by others as well as the quality of those efforts (i.e., how helpful they perceived social support to be).  Though perhaps surprising to some, the researchers found what is often the case when we examine impacts of stressor exposure – that objective occurrence of the event was much less impactful than psychological interpretations and perceptions of the event. Specifically, although those who did and did not contract the illness did not differ dramatically from each other with respect to emotional distress, perceived stressors and threats were strongly and consistently associated with greater psychological distress at all 3 time-points.  Worries and apprehensions about what could happen as the pandemic unfolded were better predictors of emotional difficulties than actually contracting COVID-19.

With respect to mitigating or buffering influences, social support was critical though the relationship is not quite as straightforward as might be supposed.  Researchers have found it necessary to distinguish between amount of social support received (number of people providing support and number of attempts/interventions provided) from perceptions of the quality of social support offered (i.e., how helpful it was perceived).  Mirroring other psychological findings related to social support in the context of major life stressors, Kaniasty and van der Meulen found that quantity of social support was associated directly/positively with greater distress.  The more social support received the greater the distress.  Importantly, it was the quality of social support – how helpful it was perceived to be – that predicted better emotional and psychological outcomes.  This is a good time to remind readers that correlation does not connote causation.  With respect to the seemingly counterintuitive finding that more support was associated with more distress, it is arguably not the case that lots of social support (i.e. high quantity of social support) caused distress. Rather, those who were experiencing significant distress probably had more people around them offer assistance.  But the quality of social support is indeed associated with better outcomes and this potential causal influence is more intuitive.