Anxiety, trauma and well-being in health-care professionals during COVID-19 first wave in Spain: the moderating role of personal protection equipment availability.

BACKGROUND: The effect of COVID-19 on Health-Care Professionals' mental health has received increased attention in the last year's literature. However, previous studies essentially evaluated psychopathological symptoms and not the presence of positive mental health. Therefore, the first objective of the present research is to evaluate health-care professionals' mental illness (i.e., anxiety and traumatic intensity) and positive mental health (i.e., well-being) using the Complete State Model of Health. Our second objective is to study the effect of Personal Protection Equipment availability on professionals' mental health. METHODS: Two-hundred and thirty-two health-care professionals working in Spain in the first line of COVID-19 patient care participated in the study. To measure anxiety, traumatic intensity and well-being participants completed the State Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Davidson Trauma Scale, and the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form. Pearson correlations were used to examine the relationships between all scales. In order to test the two continua model of mental health, we used parallel analysis and exploratory factor analysis. To analyze anxiety, traumatic intensity, and well-being differences between health-care professionals with and without Personal Protection Equipment availability we conducted different ANOVAS. To test our hypothesis regarding the moderating role of Personal Protection Equipment availability in the effect of mental illness on positive mental health, data were subjected to a hierarchical regression analysis. RESULTS: As in previous studies, health-care professionals showed high levels of anxiety and traumatic intensity. They also presented low levels of well-being indicators. According to our hypothesis, results of parallel analysis and exploratory factorial analysis indicated that the measures of mental illness and positive mental health loaded on separate but correlated factors. Finally, Personal Protection Equipment availability moderated the effects of state anxiety and traumatic intensity on professionals' well-being. CONCLUSIONS: Health-care professionals' mental illness and positive mental health reflect distinct continua, rather than the extreme ends of a single spectrum. Therefore, it is essential to measure both psychopathology and the presence of positive health to comprehensively evaluate professionals' mental health. Finally, our results indicated that Personal Protection Equipment availability is essential not only for professionals' physical health, but also for their mental health.

Affective and cognitive validation of thoughts: An appraisal perspective on anger, disgust, surprise, and awe.

Anger, disgust, surprise, and awe are multifaceted emotions. Both anger and disgust are associated with feeling unpleasant as well as experiencing a sense of confidence, whereas surprise and awe tend to be more pleasant emotions that are associated with doubt. Most prior work has examined how appraisals (confidence, pleasantness) lead people to experience different emotions or to experience different levels of intensity within the same emotion. Instead, the current research focused on the consequences (rather the antecedents) of appraisals of emotion, and it focuses specifically on the consequences for thought usage rather than the consequences for generating many or few thoughts. We show that when these four emotions are induced following thought generation, thoughts can be used either more or less with each emotion depending on whether the pleasantness/unpleasantness or confidence/doubt appraisal is made salient. In five experiments, it was predicted and found that anger and disgust following thought generation led to more thought use than surprise and awe when a confidence appraisal for the emotion was encouraged, but led to less thought use than surprise and awe when a pleasantness appraisal was made salient. The current studies are the first to reveal that different appraisals can lead to different (even opposite) outcomes on thought usage within the same experimental design. (PsycINFO Database Record