Pandemic Exposure and Adolescent Anxiety: Roles of Negative Media Exposure and Negative Coping Styles (preprint)

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic threatened people’s mental health, especially for adolescents, because their adjustment mechanisms of cognition and emotion are not perfect. They are more likely to have psychological health problems such as anxiety. The existing researches have carried out relevant discussions on this issue, indicating that excessive exposure to public health emergency events and negative coping styles are important factors causing psychological and behavioral problems such as anxiety. In this study, self-report questionnaires were distributed to 983 middle school students from Hubei province in China. This study focused on the role of negative media exposure and negative coping styles, so as to reveal the mechanism of adolescent anxiety during the pandemic. The results showed that pandemic exposure had a predicative effect on adolescent anxiety. The mechanism of this effect included the direct effect of pandemic exposure, the indirect effect of negative media exposure and negative coping styles.