Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Dec;37(12):1280-1288.
doi: 10.1002/da.23109. Epub 2020 Nov 10.

Exposure to COVID-19 pandemic stress: Associations with depression and anxiety in emerging adults in the United States

Autumn Kujawa  1 , Haley Green  1 , Bruce E Compas  1 , Lindsay Dickey  1 , Samantha Pegg  1
Affiliations

Exposure to COVID-19 pandemic stress: Associations with depression and anxiety in emerging adults in the United States

Autumn Kujawa et al. Depress Anxiety. 2020 Dec.

Abstract

Background: Stressful events due to the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are likely to have profound effects on mental health, and validated methods for assessing these experiences and associations with psychopathology are needed. We developed the Pandemic Stress Questionnaire (PSQ) and tested its psychometric properties, characterized experiences in emerging adults, and examined associations with internalizing symptoms.

Methods: Emerging adults (N = 450) completed the PSQ and measures of internalizing symptoms and perceived stress through an online platform in May 2020. One month later, 288 participants completed a follow-up questionnaire to assess reliability of the PSQ and longitudinal associations between stress and internalizing symptoms.

Results: Results supported the validity/reliability of PSQ total scores and indicated that stressful events were highly prevalent in May, particularly among younger, female, and Black emerging adults. Symptoms of depression and anxiety were high overall, but decreased at the follow-up assessment. Pandemic-related stress was moderately associated with both depression and anxiety at each assessment, but baseline stress did not predict change in symptoms when controlling for baseline symptoms.

Conclusions: Results provide empirical evidence that emerging adults are at high risk for depression and anxiety related to the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight specific types of experiences associated with greatest risk. Further, this study provides support for a questionnaire measure of experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic that can be applied in future work to advance understanding of risk and resilience in response to stressful events.

Keywords: anxiety; coronavirus; depression; pandemics; young adult.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Arditte, K. A., Çek, D., Shaw, A. M., & Timpano, K. R. (2016). The importance of assessing clinical phenomena in Mechanical Turk research. Psychological Assessment, 28(6), 684-691. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000217
    1. Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1-48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01
    1. Cao, W., Fang, Z., Hou, G., Han, M., Xu, X., Dong, J., & Zheng, J. (2020). The psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on college students in China. Psychiatry Research, 287, 112934. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2020.112934
    1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020). COVID-19 in racial and ethnic minority groups. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-...
    1. Cohen, S., Kamarck, T., & Mermelstein, R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24(4), 385-396.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources