AUTHOR=Wu Jinnan , Zheng Yelianghui , Xiong Shankuo , Zhang Wenpei , Guo Shanshan 

TITLE=The Effect of Perceived Threat Avoidability of COVID-19 on Coping Strategies and Psychic Anxiety Among Chinese College Students in the Early Stage of COVID-19 Pandemic

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychiatry

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.854698

DOI=10.3389/fpsyt.2022.854698

ISSN=1664-0640

ABSTRACT=Background: The COVID-19 outbreak has seriously threatened the mental health of college students. However, little is known about whether and how perceived threat avoidability of COVID-19 influences psychic anxiety, particularly in a sample of college students in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: This study investigates the effect of perceived threat avoidability of COVID-19 on psychic anxiety, and the mediations of both emotion-focused (wishful thinking) and problem-focused (protective behaviors) coping strategies. Structural equation modeling and Bootstrapping procedure were used to test our hypotheses with a cross-sectional dataset consisting of 2922 samples from ten universities in China in February 2020.
Results: Perceived threat avoidability of COVID-19 is negatively related to psychic anxiety, and both COVID-19-specific wishful thinking and protective behaviors mediate this relationship. Also, COVID-19-specific wishful thinking is found to correlate with COVID-19-specific protective behaviors negatively.
Conclusions: Perceived threat avoidability of COVID-19 contributes to psychic anxiety among college students. COVID-19-specific wishful thinking strategy plays a negative mediating role and increases the level of anxiety; COVID-19-specific protective behaviors strategy plays a positive mediating role and reduces the level of anxiety; meanwhile, wishful thinking also suppresses college students from adopting protective behaviors.