Worrying About Finances During COVID-19: Resiliency Enhances the Effect of Worrying on Both Proactive Behavior and Stress.

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic instability, many people are contending with financial insecurity. Guided by Conservation of Resources Theory (Hobfoll, American Psychologist 44:513-524, 1989; Hobfoll et al., Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 5:103-128, 2018), the current research explores the consequences of experiencing financial insecurity during a pandemic, with a focus on individuals who report relatively higher rates of financial insecurity, performance challenges, and stress during such experiences: working parents (American Psychological Association, 2022). This research also examines the role that personal resources, in the form of trait resiliency, play in the relationships between financial insecurity and behavioral and psychological outcomes including worrying, proactive behaviors, and stress. In a study of 636 working parents and their children, we find that financial insecurity heightens worrying, underscoring the threatening nature of the loss or anticipated loss of material resources. Worrying, in turn, promotes proactive behaviors at work-an effect that is more pronounced among high-resiliency individuals. However, worrying is also associated with elevated stress among high-resiliency individuals, providing support for a trait activation perspective (rather than buffering hypotheses) on ongoing, uncontrollable adversities. Taken together, our results help to (1) illuminate the impact of financial insecurity on work and well-being, (2) reveal a mechanism (i.e., worrying) that helps explain the links between financial insecurity and work and personal outcomes, and (3) expand our knowledge of the implications trait resiliency has for both psychological and behavioral reactions to ongoing crises.

Troubles on troubled minds: an intensive longitudinal diary study on the role of burnout in the resilience process following acute stressor exposure

Burnout negatively affects employees' health, life satisfaction, and performance. However, little is known about how burnout shapes employees' resilience process in daily life to produce these adverse effects. Therefore, we present a 30-day diary study among an international sample of 410 employees, studying burnout-related differences in response to an acute stressor (i.e., learning about the COVID-19 diagnosis of a close friend or family member). Specifically, we investigate how this event affects COVID-19-related worrying, positive and negative affect, and work engagement, both on the day itself and across several post-event days. Multilevel analyses with cross-level interactions between individual-level burnout and day-level stressor occurrence reveal that employees high in burnout score significantly higher on negative affect and lower on positive affect and work engagement on the day the stressor occurred. Additionally, discontinuous random coefficient growth modelling with burnout-time interactions shows that employees high in burnout sustain higher levels of COVID-19 worrying, but their negative and positive affect return to pre-event levels in the post-event days. These findings shed important new light on how burnout affects employees' resilience process in response to acute stressors, thereby potentially identifying a key proximal mechanism by which burnout's negative distal effects on health, well-being, and performance emerge.

Insomnia among employees in occupations with critical societal functions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigates insomnia among employees in occupations critical to the functioning of society (e.g health, education, welfare and emergency services) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these workers experience higher job pressure and increased risk of infection due to their work. It is crucial to investigate which factors that can contribute to insomnia in these important sectors. METHODS: Data was collected using an online survey administered in June 2020. The questionnaire measured demographic variables, sleep, stress, psychosocial factors and health concerns (i.e worrying about health consequences related to the pandemic). The sample in the present study consisted of 1327 (76% females) employees in organizations with societal critical functions. RESULTS: The employees reported higher levels of insomnia symptoms compared to normative data collected before the pandemic. Health concerns specifically related to COVID-19 had the strongest association to insomnia, followed by work stress. Job demands (i.e workload, time pressure and overtime) had merely a weak association to insomnia. CONCLUSION: Worrying about consequences the pandemic can have on your own health and the health of your family or colleagues have a stronger negative impact on sleep than work pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic. Impaired sleep can have detrimental effects on performance and health, and a stronger focus on preventing insomnia as a mean of sustaining critical societal functions both during and after the pandemic is warranted. Organizations should consider interventions aimed at reducing health concerns among their employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Psychological well-being, risk factors, and coping strategies with social isolation and new challenges in times of adversity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVE: COVID-19 triggers anxiety and fear due to several reasons, and thus, dealing with it requires prolonged coping mechanisms. When the number of infections soared, to slow the spread, many governments decided to close universities and dormitories and move teaching to online platforms. The majority of the university students decided to move back home to their parents changing their social lives. Here, we aimed to point to risk, as well as protective factors, and understand the influence of these factors on both physical and psychological indicators of well-being. Further, to discover how university students cope with maintaining their social lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHOD: We collected online survey data from multiple university sources. Participants (N = 605) completed measures of emotion regulation strategies, knowledge on the disease, contamination fear, perceived social support, worrying and intolerance of uncertainty, quality of sleep, well-being, emotional stability, anxiety, and depression. RESULTS: Our results showed that the most prominent risk and protective factors that were most strongly associated with the indicators of well-being were rumination, catastrophizing, positive refocusing, and social support from family; respectively. CONCLUSION: These results have implications for professionals working with and helping (e.g., as counselors) people during the challenges of an emergency.

Involvement, worries and loneliness of family caregivers of people with dementia during the COVID-19 visitor ban in long-term care facilities.

To prevent COVID-19 from spreading in long-term care facilities (LTCFs), the Dutch government took restrictive measures, including a visitor-ban in LTCFs. This study examined the relationship between involvement of family caregivers (FCs) of people with dementia (PwD) living in LTCFs and FCs mental health during the visitor-ban, and whether this relationship was moderated by the frequency of alternative contact with PwD during the visitor-ban and FC resilience. This cross-sectional study collected data from 958 FCs. FCs who visited PwD more frequently before, were more worried during the visitor-ban than those with lower visiting frequency. FCs who visited the PwD daily before, but had minimal weekly contact during the visitor-ban, worried less. Resilient FCs who did social and task-related activities before, experienced less loneliness during the visitor-ban. It is advisable for healthcare professionals to reach out to these groups, to facilitate ongoing contact and help them overcome their loneliness.

Well-being and sleep in stressful times of the COVID-19 pandemic: Relations to worrying and different coping strategies.

The present study examined the relationships between emotional well-being (positive and negative affect), sleep-related variables (sleep quality, sleep duration, and change in sleep quality and duration compared to weeks before lockdown), and worrying about coronavirus disease (COVID-19) challenges during the beginning of the outbreak in Europe. In addition, four different coping strategies were investigated. The study was conducted in Germany with data from 665 participants (53.8% female; 18-73 years), who completed an online questionnaire in April 2020. The results revealed that COVID-19 worry was associated with impaired well-being and sleep. Meaning- and problem-focused coping were the most frequently used coping strategies, and showed positive associations with well-being and sleep. Social and avoidance coping were associated with decreased well-being and worse sleep outcomes. Three coping strategies showed moderating effects. People who worried more showed higher levels of positive affect when they used problem-focused coping compared to those who did not. Similarly, highly worried participants showed lower levels of negative affect when they reported using meaning-focused coping more often. In contrast, social coping increased the risk of high negative affect levels in worried participants. In conclusion, problem-focused and meaning-focused coping strategies seemed to be most effective in coping with COVID-19 challenges.

COVID-19 Rumination Scale (C-19RS): Initial psychometric evidence in a sample of Dutch employees.

OBJECTIVES: Starting with the spring of 2020, COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every aspect of our lives. Due to its threatening nature, along with the rapid rise in contamination and mortality figures, the spread of the virus has caused a considerable rise in individuals' anxieties. To enable the assessment of the COVID-19-triggered individual rumination, we developed and tested a COVID-19 Rumination Scale (C-19RS). DESIGN AND METHODS: Demographics (i.e., gender, age and education) and several items assessing the proximity of one's exposure to the virus (i.e., whether one's family and close friends are affected) were evaluated as antecedents of C-19RS that provided evidence for the criterion validity of the scale. A sample of 523 Dutch employees working in different companies and sectors completed the online survey in March 2020. RESULTS: Results showed that women, older individuals and workers with lower educational level ruminated considerably more about COVID-19. In keeping with prior theoretical and empirical work on stress and coping, we established that COVID-19 ruminative thoughts can unlock withdrawal coping reactions (i.e., self-handicapping) and drain individual's energy (i.e., causing emotional exhaustion), whereby providing evidence for the predictive validity of the new instrument. In addition, we examined how the COVID-19 rumination evolved during the nearly 3-week period of the data collection, a time-frame that coincided with the introduction of the national restrictive measures in the Netherlands. Results showed a drop in the level of rumination, which might be indicative of potential habituation with the stressor. CONCLUSIONS: The results supported the sound psychometric qualities of the scale.