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. 2022 Dec 9;19(24):16541.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph192416541.

Country/Region Level Pandemic Severity Moderates the Relationships among Risk Experience, Perceived Life Satisfaction, and Psychological Distress in COVID-19

Yi-Hui Christine Huang  1 , Jie Sun  1 , Ruoheng Liu  1 , Jennifer Lau  1 , Qinxian Cai  1
Affiliations

Country/Region Level Pandemic Severity Moderates the Relationships among Risk Experience, Perceived Life Satisfaction, and Psychological Distress in COVID-19

Yi-Hui Christine Huang et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Scholars and communications practitioners worldwide have sought novel resilience models amid heightened rates of psychological distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined perceived life satisfaction as a determinant of resilience. Additionally, we investigated the assumption that perceived pandemic severity at the country/region level moderates structural relationships within our risk-resilience model. Analyzing more than 34,000 valid samples from 15 countries/regions, we found that (1) perceived life satisfaction alleviated psychological distress across all 15 countries/regions; and (2) country/region-level pandemic severity moderated the relationships among COVID-19 symptom experience, perceived life satisfaction, and psychological distress. The effects of COVID-19 symptom experience and perceived life satisfaction on psychological distress were conditional. We discuss possible mechanisms behind our findings and provide practical implications for mitigating psychological distress during public health crises.

Keywords: COVID-19; country/region-level severity; perceived life satisfaction; risk resilience model; social comparison.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Theoretical framework.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Cumulative confirmed cases (per million people) of studied countries/regions. Figures represent the number of daily cumulative confirmed cases (per million people) from the first reported cases to the final day of the VIC survey in each country/region. The solid lines represent countries/regions in the low severity group. The dotted lines represent countries/regions in the high severity group. The reference line is the first day of the VIC survey in each country/region.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The effect of (a) COVID-19 symptom experience and (b) perceived life satisfaction on psychological distress and (c) the effect of COVID-19 symptom experience on perceived life satisfaction.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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