key: cord-0691279-qhn037ap authors: Hou, Wai Kai; Tong, Horace; Liang, Li; Li, Tsz Wai; Liu, Huinan; Ben-Ezra, Menachem; Goodwin, Robin; Lee, Tatia Mei-chun title: Probable anxiety and components of psychological resilience amid COVID-19: A population-based study date: 2021-03-01 journal: J Affect Disord DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.12.127 sha: 4410851c19a592888abb4eb73bbc2022349ed3fd doc_id: 691279 cord_uid: qhn037ap BACKGROUND: This study examined the associations between components of psychological resilience and mental health at different levels of exposure to COVID-19 stressors. METHODS: A population-representative sample of 4,021 respondents were recruited and assessed between February 25th and March 19th, 2020. Respondents reported current anxiety symptoms (7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale [GAD-7]), cognitive components (perceived ability to adapt to change, tendency to bounce back after adversities) and behavioral components (regularity of primary and secondary daily routines) of resilience, worry about COVID-19 infection, and sociodemographics. RESULTS: Logistic regression revealed that cognitive and behavioral components of resilience were not correlated with probable anxiety (GAD-7≥10) among those reporting no worry. Among respondents who were worried, all resilient components were inversely associated with probable anxiety. Specifically, propensity to bounce back and regular primary routines were more strongly related to lower odds of probable anxiety among those reporting lower levels of worry. LIMITATIONS: The cross-sectional design limits causal inference. Second, other resilient components and some key daily routines that could be related to better mental health were not assessed. Third, generalizability of the findings to other similar major cities is uncertain because cases and deaths due to COVID-19 in Hong Kong have been comparatively lower. CONCLUSIONS: To foster mental health, cultivation of confidence in one's ability to adapt to change and a propensity to bounce back from hardship should be coupled with sustainment of regular daily routines. Such assessment and intervention protocols could be more relevant to those who suffer heightened levels of exposure to COVID-19 stressors. Different forms of lockdown, quarantine, and social/physical distancing have been implemented across most countries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. These infection control strategies have changed key life domains, impacting on personal mobility (e.g. activity limitations due to home confinement), interpersonal relationships (e.g. reduced face-to-face interaction), and occupational/educational activities (e.g., changes in employment roles and daily activities of workers and students). Recent evidence showed that these pandemic-related stressful events and life changes could lead to serious psychological distress (Ben-Ezra et al., 2020a,b; Goodwin et al., 2020b) , and could be a reference of functional impairments consequential to common mental disorders, such as depression, suggesting a probable mental health toll (Holmes et al., 2020; Üstün and Kennedy, 2009) . There is therefore an urgent need for identifying adaptive psychological and behavioral pathways that reduce the potential burden on mental health services. Using convenience samples studies have already identified a handful of psychosocial predictors of mental health since the outbreak of the pandemic. Loneliness was related to higher levels of anxiety, depressive, and PTSD symptoms in a community sample of 3,480 Spanish people (González-Sanguino et al., 2020) . Perceived effective social distancing and lower negative impact of COVID-19 were associated with more positive and less negative feelings amongst Italians both in Italy and living abroad (N=9,000) (Zanin et al., 2020) . Higher levels of social support and greater self-efficacy were associated with lower perceived stress and anxiety symptoms amongst Chinese medical staff treating COVID-19 patients (Xiao et al., 2020) as well as college students (Cao et al., 2020) . Compared with people unaffected by quarantine, depressive and PTSD symptoms were higher among Chinese people under quarantine during COVID-19, with higher levels of symptoms related to absence of perceived support from the community and government (Lai et al., 2020c) . One construct that is of high relevance to adaptation to the current COVID-19 pandemic is psychological resilience. Resilience has been intensively investigated as an outcome that reflects a human potential to lead a normal living, even after experiencing major life challenges. Masten (2001 Masten ( , 2014 suggested this "ordinary magic" is present among children and adolescents who demonstrated normative psychological functioning despite past and present adversity. "Ordinary magic" means that resilience is not attributable to extraordinary qualities but normative adaptation and coping resources in everyday life. Across stressful life events such as bereavement, terrorist attack, mass violence, natural disasters, and life-threatening illnesses, the majority of the people demonstrated subclinical levels of psychological distress or psychological well-being over time (Bonanno, 2004; Galatzer-Levy et al., 2018; Hou et al., 2010; Infurna and Luthur, 2017) . During the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in Hong Kong, patients of SARS who demonstrated consistently subclinical levels of psychological distress reported lower levels of SARS-related worry and higher levels of perceived social support relative to those demonstrating clinically significant psychological distress over time (Bonanno et al., 2008) . Higher perceived social capital was found to be associated with lower depression risk amid COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong . Psychological resilience has also been considered as a multidimensional construct regulated dynamically by the complex interaction of external and internal social, behavioral, cognitive, biological, and neural factors (Kalisch et al., 2017) . Resilience encompasses at least three key components: (1) flexible adaptation to changing external/environmental and internal/mental demands (e.g. Luthar et al., 2000) ; (2) propensity to bounce back and demonstrate positive functioning in adversity (e.g., Zautra et al., 2010) ; and (3) effective interpersonal interactions and quality relationships that buffer individuals from psychosocial distress (e.g., Skodol, 2010) . These components of psychological resilience have been used to reflect overall coping ability in adversity and are associated with adaptive psychological functioning (Connor and Davidson, 2003; Hu et al., 2015) . Longitudinal investigations have reported that survivors who demonstrated stably high psychological resilience also reported lower levels of anxiety, depressive, or PTSD symptoms in the years following the Great East Japan Earthquake (Okuyama et al., 2018; Kukihara et al., 2014) . There is further evidence suggesting the importance of considering individual cognitive components in evaluating mental health during COVID-19. Perceived tenacity and strength of overcoming difficulties were lower among health care workers who lacked experiences in public health emergency treatment compared to those with more relevant experiences and resources. Both of these two components were inversely associated with psychological distress (Cai et al., 2020) . Apart from such cognitive components, the Drive to Thrive (DTT) theory suggests that patterns of daily behavior are concomitant with underlying processes of psychological resilience during trauma and chronic stress conditions (Hou et al., 2018 . Regularized routines have been found to buffer the adverse impact of stress exposure on mental health . Survivors of natural disasters tend to maintain regular daily activities in response to post-disaster stress (Fukuda et al., 1999; Parks et al., 2018) , with the restoration or preservation of pre-disaster daily routines predictive of lower psychological distress prospectively in the years following the Great East Japan Earthquake (Goodwin et al., 2019) . Meta-analysis of conflict-affected forced migrants found that a disruption in different types of daily experiences mediated the positive association between premigration trauma exposure and postmigration psychiatric symptoms, with premigration trauma related to more disrupted daily living and greater mental health problems in postmigration settings (Hou et al., 2020c) . While resilience factors such as self-efficacy and social relationships/support have been found to predict lower psychological distress during COVID-19 (Lai et al., 2020c; Xiao et al, 2020) , cognitive and behavioral components of psychological resilience were understudied. To examine associations between the components and outcomes of psychological resilience during COVID-19, it is important to take into account stressor exposure (Bonanno, 2004; Masten, 2014) . Proxies for indicating stressor exposure include perceived or actual threat to human functioning (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984) or subjective feelings of stress (Cohen et al., 2007) . In particular, in Hong Kong, a region that was badly impacted by SARS in 2003, perceived risk of infection by SARS was associated with higher depressive symptoms three years after the SARS outbreak (Liu, et al., 2012) . Worry about infection and perceived susceptibility were associated with higher psychological symptoms including anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (Kwok et al., 2020; Wang et al, 2020) . This study aims to examine associations between the understudied aspects of psychological resilience (i.e., cognitive and behavioral components) and mental health during COVID-19 in Hong Kong. We expect that both cognitive and behavioral components will be inversely associated with probable anxiety (i.e. Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale [GAD-7] score ≥10) across different levels of exposure to COVID-19 stressors. We also investigated whether the inverse associations between cognitive and behavioral components and the risk of anxiety will be positively or inversely related to levels of worry. Upon obtaining Ethics Committee's approval from The Education University of Hong Kong, respondent recruitment and telephone interviews were conducted by the Centre for Communication and Public Opinion Survey of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute between February 25 and March 19, 2020 (the acute phase of the epidemic in Hong Kong). A Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) system was used. Random digit dialing was used to recruit a population representative sample of Hong Kong residents. A dual-frame approach of sampling with both landline and mobile phone numbers (50% each) was utilized. Telephone numbers were randomly extracted from databases of telephone numbers released by the Hong Kong Communication Authority. A person was considered eligible if he/she was (1) a Hong Kong Chinese resident, (2) 15 years of age or older, and (3) Cantonese-speaking. For the landline phone calls, if multiple household members were eligible after successful contact, the one with the closest birthday to the interview date was selected. Further attempts would be arranged by CATI to the dial-out numbers which were "no answer," "busy," or "eligible respondent not at home." Oral informed consent was obtained at the beginning of interview. All interviews were conducted during both working and nonworking hours from 2pm to 10pm on weekdays and weekends. Among the total 92,509 telephone numbers attempted, 38,538 (41.7%) of them were ineligible for interview (i.e., invalid, nonresident/business telephone, fax numbers, no eligible respondent); 48,765 (52.7%) were unconfirmed whether eligible or not. Among the 5,206 (5.6%) contacted eligible cases, interviews were completed by 4,021 (77.2%), whereas 884 (17.0%) indicated refusal and 301 (5.8%) eligible respondents did not complete the interviews. A cooperation rate of 77.2% was recorded (i.e., number of completed interviews / number of contacted eligible cases). The sampling error was within ±2.2% at 95% confidence level. The participation and nonparticipation rates were acceptable and comparable with the population-representative samples in prior studies in Hong Kong (Galea and Tracy, 2007; Hou et al., 2015; Leung et al., 2005) . Scale-2 (CD-RISC2) was used to assess the cognitive components of "ability to adapt to change" and "tendency to bounce back after illness or hardship" within the construct of psychological resilience (Vaishnavi et al., 2007) . Respondents were asked to rate the items with reference to their experience in the past two weeks on an 11-point scale ranging from 0 (not true at all) to 10 (true nearly all the time). This abbreviated scale was translated into Chinese and have been validated among Hong Kong Chinese with good validity and reliability (Ni et al., 2015) . Cronbach's alpha was 0.78 in the current administration. Behavioral components of resilience. Items from the Sustainability of Living Inventory (SOLI; Hou et al., 2019) were adapted to assess regularity of primary and secondary daily routines. Primary routines are necessary for maintaining livelihood and biological needs whereas secondary routines are optional in accordance with motivations and preferences . Respondents rated to what extent healthy eating and sleep (primary routines) and socializing and leisure activities (secondary routines) were disrupted in the past two weeks on an 11-point scale (0=high level of disruption, 10=no disruption). The two items have been found to be validly associated with mental health in population survey . Higher scores indicated greater regularity. Anxiety symptoms. The 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) was used to assess anxiety symptoms (Spitzer et al., 2006) . Respondents rated each item on a 4-point Likert scale (0=not at all, 1=on several days, 2=on more than half of the days, 3=nearly every day) based on their experience in the past two weeks. Higher scores indicated greater severity of anxiety symptoms (range=0-21). High internal consistency and validity of the scale have been shown in different populations (Spitzer et al., 2006) . Alpha in the current study was 0.93. Scores of 10 or higher were used to indicate clinically significant anxiety symptoms (Plummer et al., 2016) , with the scores recoded into 0 (scores=0-9) or 1 (scores=10-21). Worry about COVID-19 infection. Respondents reported the extent to which they felt worried about being infected with COVID-19 on a 4point scale (0=not at all, 1=some, 2=quite a bit, 3=very much). Sociodemographics. A standardized proforma was used to ask respondents' age in years, gender, marital status, education level, employment status, monthly household income, and income change (gain, no change, or loss) since the COVID-19 outbreak. Multiple imputation was conducted to replace missing data (<1%) using SPSS (Version 26; SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL). COVID-19 stressor exposure referred to responses to the item on worry about infection: not at all (0), some (1), quite a bit (2), and a lot (3). Prevalence of probable anxiety and descriptive statistics of the cognitive and behavioral components of resilience, namely ability to adapt to change, propensity to bounce back, and regularity of primary routines (i.e., healthy eating and sleep) and secondary routines (i.e., socializing and leisure activities) were identified for respondents at different levels of worry separately. The associations of probable anxiety (GAD-7≥10) with cognitive and behavioral components of psychological resilience were tested in multivariable logistic regression models, adjusted for gender (female vs. male), age group (15-24 vs. 25-34, 35-44, 45-64, ≥65) , marital status (unmarried vs. married), education level (primary/below and secondary vs. tertiary/above), employment status (dependent and unemployed vs. employed), monthly household income (