RESUMEN
Introduction Three days after the statement of the global pandemic situation on March 11 by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020), the government of Spain implemented a state of alarm in order to confine the population (Real Decreto, 463/2020). The confinement of the population and the limitation of social contact, whose objective was the control of community transmission of the pathogen, have had indirect adverse effects on mental health and family relationships that have already been studied (Fariña et al., 2020;Pampliega et al., 2019;Rodríguez-Rey et al., 2020;Rubin & Wessely, 2020;Xiang et al., 2020). At first, research on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a stressful event, focused on the population of health professionals, with controversial results. [...]some studies (Babore et al., 2020;Vagni et al., 2020) found an increase in the use of emotional and cognitive avoidance strategies -maladaptive, passive strategies-, reducing the use of social support strategies;while other studies found that they resorted more to active and problem-focused coping strategies -adaptive, active strategies(Cai et al., 2020;Huang et al., 2020). Taking into account the above, we set out a cross-sectional study in which to analyze the psychological distress caused by confinement in the general population, as well as to know the coping strategies used to manage the stress derived from the pandemic context, so that can be contributed useful knowledge for the design of prevention and empowerment programs for citizens.