Impact of Covid 19 on Perceived Stress and Social Support during Lockdown

Background: Perceived stress is the feelings or thoughts that an individual has about how much stress they are under at a given point in time or over a given time period. Social support represents the amount of support that a person perceives and reports receive it. Social support is a phenomenon that involves interactions of people so that when a person offers social interaction, it has an important role in his health. The present study explores the relationship between perceived stress and social support during Covid 19 lockdown and its relationship with demographic variables such as age, gender, education qualifications and employment status.. Methodology: The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) and The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) was completed by 120 samples - 70 males and 50 females - aged between 18 to 79 years. Descriptive, correlation, and t-test was used for data analysis. Results: The mean scores of perceived stress and social support was 17.53 and 5.39 respectively. The r value of -.406 obtained for perceived social support with perceived stress was found to be significant. This indicate a moderate levels of perceived stress and perceived social support among the respondents. The p value of 0.04 and 0.006 for perceived stress indicate a significant influence of age and gender. For educational qualifications, a p value of 0.478 and 0.7436 was obtained for perceived stress and social support. A p value for perceived was 0.001 and for perceived social support p value obtained was 0.00, for the variable of employment status. Conclusion: There was a significant negative relationship between perceived stress and perceived social support. Age and gender significantly affected the perceived stress experienced by the respondents during the lockdown period. Education made no difference to perceived stress and perceived social support. Employment status however affected both perceived stress and perceived social support

The relationship between age, gender and the dark triad of personality

Background: Dark triad refers to a set of traits that include the tendency to seek admiration and specialtreatment (otherwise known as Narcissism), to be callous and insensitive (Psychopathy) and to manipulateothers (Machiavellianism). The purpose of this study was to study the difference in dark triad amongstindividuals with different age groups and gender.Methods: Convenient sampling was used to collect the data. A total of 90 participants (44 males and 46females) participated in the study with consent. The respondents belonged to three age groups: earlyadulthood (20-34), midlife (35-49) and mature adulthood (50-64). A 27-item version of The Short DarkTriad (SD3) was used for the assessment of dark triad.Results: Descriptive statistics, t-test and one way ANOVA was used to analyze the data. The findingsindicate that there is no significant difference in Narcissism and Machiavellianism between males andfemales however there is a significant difference in Psychopathy between males and females. Also, the Fvalue indicate that there is a significant difference in the three personality traits in reference to different agegroups. Post hoc analysis indicates a significant difference in psychopathic behavior between 20-35yrs(early adulthood) and 36-49 (mid life adulthood) age groups and between 20-35yrs and 50-64yrs (matureadulthood) age groups. However there is no significant difference in psychopathic behavior between 36-49yrs and 50-64yrs age group.Conclusion: Males score higher on psychological tendencies as compared to females. Secondly,psychopathic tendencies are more in participants who are in early adulthood (20-34) than people in midlife(35-49) and mature adulthood (50-64).