JMIR Publications

Background:

In situations of acute stress, individuals may engage in prosocial behaviors or alternatively, individuals may engage in risk taking self-oriented behaviors. The COVID-19 pandemic created large stress-promoting conditions that impacted individuals’ decisions to adhere to COVID-19 preventative behaviors.

Objective:

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between anxiety during the pandemic and adherence behaviors to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and the moderating influence of prosocial behaviors. We hypothesized that individuals with high anxiety during COVID-19 would adhere more to preventive COVID-19 behaviors, compared to the ones with low anxiety, and that this relationship would be stronger in those individuals with higher prosocial behaviors.

Methods:

An online survey was administered through the SONA online participant tool of the Department of Psychology at a university in the Northeastern United States of America. A final sample of 54 undergraduate students completed online questionnaires during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, from January 2021 to May 2021 which included demographic measures and surveys on prosocial behaviors, anxiety, and COVID-19 preventive behaviors. Moderation analyses were conducted using Process in SPSS.

Results:

Participants reported high levels of anxiety trait and state symptoms, most of them meeting or exceeding the cut-off criteria for clinically meaningful (state anxiety 87% and trait anxiety 86%) and over 50% highly adhered to engage in the COVID-19 preventive behaviors of wearing a face mask, using hand sanitizer, handwashing, coughing/sneezing into elbow or into a tissue, self-quarantining, maintaining social distance, avoiding social gatherings and avoiding non-essential traveling. No significant associations were observed between prosocial behavior, anxiety types, and adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors. However, when moderation analyses were conducted between anxiety types and adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors, results demonstrated a statistically significant interaction of public prosocial behavior with state anxiety (β = -.17, t= -2.60; p=.01) predicting engagement in COVID-19 preventative behaviors. At high levels of anxiety, low levels of prosocial public behaviors were associated with higher engagement in COVID-19 preventative behaviors. In contrast, high levels of public prosocial behavior were associated with low engagement in COVID-19 preventative behaviors at higher levels of anxiety.

Conclusions:

These results provide information that can aid in the creation of interventions that could increase adherence to COVID-19 preventative behaviors (reviewed by the Plan P #PeerRef Community).