key: cord-256795-j66tcamq
authors: Wang, Jin; Wang, Zhuo; Liu, Xiaojin; Yang, Xiaofan; Zheng, Meilin; Bai, Xuejun
title: The impacts of a COVID-19 epidemic focus and general belief in a just world on individual emotions()
date: 2020-08-20
journal: Pers Individ Dif
DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2020.110349
sha: 
doc_id: 256795
cord_uid: j66tcamq

Whether the general belief in a just world (GBJW) can protect individual emotions during a major disaster is a matter of debate. This study conducted two experiments to explore this question during the COVID-19 epidemic. Experiment 1 (N = 92, M(age) = 22.52, 48.91% was male) manipulated the focus regarding the COVID-19 epidemic to investigate the impact of this focus on participants' emotions. The results showed that compared with the nonepidemic focus group, the epidemic focus group had higher negative emotions and lower positive emotions. Experiment 2 (N = 200, M(age) = 23.91, 49% was male) manipulated the epidemic focus and GBJW to investigate their effects on the participants' emotions. The results showed that high levels of GBJW reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions regardless of whether the participants were focused on the epidemic. This study expands the influence of the GBJW on individual emotions and finds that the GBJW can protect individuals' emotions when they face a major social disaster. These findings imply that controlling people's intake of information on the epidemic can avoid their suffering from the vicarious traumatization caused by epidemic-related information overload and that improving the public's GBJW protects their mental health during an epidemic.

. When psychological stress events have low interpersonal dependence and controllability, such as earthquakes and floods, people's negative emotions may depend on how they view the disaster that happens to them. Therefore, in contrast with the protective effect of the PBJW on individual emotions because of the belief that the world is just for oneself, the effects of the GBJW on individual emotions have been relatively weak (Otto et al., 2006; Xie et al., 2011) .

However, some psychological stress events have high interpersonal dependency and controllability.

For example, COVID-19 is highly infectious. If a person is infected with the virus and does not isolate himself in a timely manner, this person will pose a threat to the health of many people. In this context, individual health and safety depends on the health of other people, which strengthens the dependencies between people. At the same time, the COVID-19 epidemic is controllable because individuals can take precautions to avoid infection, for example, handwashing effectively, keeping a social distance, wearing masks, or even locking down to protect themselves .

Isolation or lock downs established by governments are also considered to be effective precautionary measure to control the spread of an epidemic although they are experienced as taxing because it is difficult to estimate the time of the emergency period .Therefore, the belief that the world is fair to everyone (i.e., the GBJW) may protect an individual's emotions. Studies have shown that the GBJW among vulnerable groups has a significant positive correlation with happiness (Jiang et al., 2013) because vulnerable groups need to rely on the existing social system to continuously compensate for their disadvantages. If people's dependence on the system and their resulting institutional trust lead the GBJW to contribute to individual happiness and life satisfaction (Jiang et al., 2013; Zhang & Zhang, 2015) , then can "person-to-person dependence" also cause the GBJW to have a positive effect on individual emotions during an epidemic? Previous studies have paid little attention to this issue, although some studies have found that the GBJW can improve interpersonal trust (Begue, 2002; Otto & Dalbert, 2005) . Therefore, in the face of psychological stress events with high interpersonal dependence, the GBJW may promote a sense of trust in others and a stable perception of the environment, which alleviates the negative impact of these events on individual emotions. Some recent studies on large samples showed the emotional states of people only during the J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof COVID-19 epidemic period, and most of them did not conduct a comparative analysis with the emotional states of people in a nonepidemic period (Geldsetzer, 2020; Man et al., 2020; Wang & Gao, 2020) . Thus, these studies cannot explain the causal relationship between an epidemic focus and individual emotions. Moreover, nearly none of these studies responded to the debate whether the GBJW can protect individual emotions during a major social disaster (e.g., Guo et al., 2020) .

Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore the impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic and GBJW on individual emotions during a major social disaster. This study hypothesized that a focus on the COVID-19 epidemic may have a negative impact on individual emotions, while the GBJW may alleviate this negative impact. Two experiments were conducted to test these hypotheses. were healthy Chinese citizens who were isolating at home (i.e., under lockdown). Specifically, the students studied online and the working people worked online at home. None came from a high-risk area of COVID-19 (e.g., Hubei Province in China as of February 2020), and none of their relatives were infected by or lost lives because of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The participants were randomly assigned to a focus condition in a between-subjects design, namely, an epidemic focus group (N = 47) and a nonepidemic focus group (N = 45). The gender, age and education of the participants but not employment status were matched so that the participants' demographic factors were balanced in the two experimental conditions. More precisely, the epidemic focus group included 21 males and 28 undergraduates with an age range from 18 to 28 years, while the nonepidemic focus group included 24 males and 23 undergraduates with an age range from 18 to 28 years.

The experiment was conducted online on February 23, 2020. The participants were informed that the study aimed to investigate people's social mentality. First, they read one of two focus materials and completed manipulation check items and a measurement of individual emotions. Then, they were instructed to respond to questions regarding a socially desirable response and the perceived credibility of the materials. Following these steps, the participants were debriefed and automatically given ¥5.00 by Questionnaire Star as thanks for their participation.

By adopting the fake news material paradigm (Wang et al., 2018) to manipulate the epidemic focus, we presented the "Sina.com news synthesis" mobile page to the participants to enhance the perceived authenticity of the news material. In the epidemic focus group, the news theme presented was "the total number of people diagnosed in the country has reached more than 70,000, the new pneumonia epidemic situation is grim". In the nonepidemic focus group, the popular science news theme presented was "What is the phototropism of plants?" To strengthen the effect of the manipulation, we instructed the participants to cite examples in the news to illustrate the main ideas.

Manipulation check items. Three compiled epidemic focus items were used as the manipulation check (e.g., "I was thinking about the COVID-19 epidemic when reading the material"), Cronbach's α = 0.94. Due to the possible influence of the trustworthiness of the materials on the manipulation effects, one item was used to measure the trustworthiness of the materials on a 7-point scale (1 = do not trust at all to 7 = trust completely). The ratings were significantly above the scale's midpoint of 4, which indicates that the materials were trusted, Ms > 4.86, SDs < 1.34, ts > 4.70, ps < 0.001, Cohen's ds > 0.97.

Individual emotions. A revised Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS, Huang et al., 2003) that has often been used to measure general individual emotions under normal conditions combined with a measurement of individual emotions during the COVID-19 epidemic period (Wang & Gao, 2020; Guo et al., 2020) were used, and 10 emotion words were selected in this experiment. The negative emotion words included anger, worry, sadness, fear, irritability, tension, depression and anxiety; the positive emotion words included calmness and optimism. The participants were asked to respond to the question, "After reading the news, to what extent are you experiencing the following emotions at this moment?" The responses were given on a 7-point scale, and a higher score represented a stronger emotional experience. The reliability of this scale was good (for negative emotion, Cronbach's α = 0.91; for positive emotion, Cronbach's α = 0.60).

Socially desirable responding (SDR). Because of the possible influence of socially desirable responding on individual emotions, an SDR scale with 6 items was used (Chinese version of Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability scale, MCSD, Yang, 2004) , for example, "When you make a mistake, you always admit it", Cronbach's α = 0.72.

More precisely, four negative emotions (i.e., worry, sadness, fear and tension) were significantly positively affected by the epidemic focus, Fs > 4.15, ps < 0.05. The main effect of the GBJW was also significant, and the negative emotion was significantly lower in the high GBJW group (M = 2.51, SD = 1.17) than in the low GBJW group (M = 3.34, SD = 1.13) , F(1, 191) = 7.09, p < 0.01, η p 2 = 0.07) (Fig. 3) .

The results of the univariate analysis of variance with calmness as the dependent variable show that after controlling for the demographic variables and SDR that were considered to be covariates (Fs < 1.17, Ps > 0.28), the main effect of the GBJW was significant. The participants reported a higher GBJW in the high GBJW group (M = 5.00, SD = 1.54) than in the low GBJW group (M = 4.32, SD = 1.45), F(1, 191) = 10.27, p < 0.01, η p 2 = 0.05. However, neither the main effect of the epidemic focus nor the interaction between the epidemic focus and GBJW was significant, F(1, 191) = 0.008, p = 0.93, η p 2 < 0.001; F(1, 191) = 0.83, p = 0.37, η p 2 = 0.004. The results showed that a high

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