Special Issue Effect of Covid-19 pandemic: vulnerability and resources. Part 2

Abstract

The first seven contributions to this issue of Psychology hub derive from the call for papers of the Italian Psychology Association (AIP) centered around the “Effect of Covid-19 pandemic: vulnerability and resources”. Together with the first five papers of the previous issue and with the first contributions of the next one, these papers will cover all the articles received from the AIP members in response to the previously mentioned call for papers.
The first contribution of this issue, titled “The five-day challenge: how to turn a change into a chance. An action-research to promote resilience and self-empowerment during lockdown”, written by Teresa Galanti, Stefania Fantinelli, Michela Cortini e Teresa Di Fiore”, is aimed to investigate the level of well-being of Italians during the lockdown and to promote the acquisition of proactive behaviours and self-empowerment. The results of the research study suggest that dispositional optimism is positively associated with wellbeing, with this association mediated, in a negative way, by state anxiety. Moreover, it shows a significant effect of an intervention proposed on anxiety level reduction of participants.
The second contribution, written by Michela Marchetti, Daniele Gatti, Lucio Inguscio and Giuliana Mazzoni and titled “Psychological well-being and lockdown: a study on an Italian sample during the first COVID-19 wave” points out how during the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy, only the perceived usefulness of lockdown, among several other variables, positively affected people’s emotions, showing the importance of political communication in time of crisis such as that one.
The third contribution, whose title is “The psychological impact of the pandemic: the effects of COVID-19 pictures on emotional processing”, written by Raffaella Maria Ribatti, Antonietta Curci and Tiziana Lanciano, investigates the long term consequences of the exposition to COVID-19 related pictures and shows how they stir up negative affective states that increase over time and favor a relevant persistence of long-term rumination and a significant persistence of intrusive thoughts.
The fourth contribution, written by Calogero Lo Destro and titled “Psychological factors predicting social distance during the COVID-19 pandemic: an empirical investigation” investigates several psychosocial factors which may contribute to the compliance with the government rules about social distancing. This research study shows how participants’ social distance, in response to both coughing and smiling targets, was predicted by fear of infection and by the perception COVID-19 could become a pandemic. Social distance in response to coughing target was also significantly and positively predicted by age and state anxiety.
The fifth contribution, “Remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic: A study on the emotional and relational experience and on the well-being of Italian university scholars and clerks”, written by Ciro Esposito, Barbara Agueli, Caterina Arcidiacono and Immacolata Di Napoli, shows that scholars consider remote working mainly as a critical issue, while clerks see it more as a resource. Moreover, clerks more frequently report negative feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger, while scholars more frequently report loneliness. Moreover, clerks reported lower economic and overall well-being compared to scholars.
The sixth contribution, written by Claudio Russo, Giuseppe Giordano and Giuseppina Marsico, and whose title is “The social pandemic from SARS-CoV-2 among Italian university students: a pilot study” analyze qualitative data on the lived experience against the occurrence of health-related behaviors and shows that the extent to which the participants have reported a lower degree of satisfaction on living arrangements, intimate and family relationships appears to be meaningfully related with a more negative lived experience.
The last paper connected to COVID-19 topic, “Effects of Anti-COVID Face Masks on Contagion Risk Evaluation: Wearing a Mask Intensifies Moral Judgments Towards Risky Behaviors”, written by Matteo Perini and Simona Sciara, investigates the effects of complying with measures aimed at offsetting the risks of spreading COVID-19 on the evaluation of risks themselves, and shows an effect of mask-wearing on the moral judgments towards behaviors at risk of COVID-19 contagion, with no significant results for other morality-unrelated attitudes towards risks.
The last contribution to this issue is, in our opinion, a useful work tool for researchers and theoreticians. Written by Bala Subramanian and Munish Thakur, this “Review of Theories in Gratitude Literature” synthetically describes the different theories applied to explain the phenomenon of gratitude in research papers, analysing the different proposed models according to their scope and level of analysis.
We want to stress the richness of the perspectives and of the methodologies utilized in the papers published in this issue, and how they can help us better understand the psychological consequences of the pandemic, the psychological and social mediators of these influences, and the possibilities of developing and implementing interventions aimed at reducing the negative impact and side effects of the measures adopted to defend the population from the infection.
We think also that this richness is a sign of the good health of our community of academic psychologists in its different specificities and sensitivities, and we hope in future collaborations of our journal and this community.