![]() Locus of control (LoC) is among the four most widely investigated personality traits. Research is needed to identify psychological moderators that are stable, established, and robust, so that their assumed stress-buffering effect would be less dependent on sample characteristics and regional pandemic differences. ![]() ![]() Although their stress buffering and/or resilience strengthening effects are empirically confirmed in the respective study samples, it is open to what extent the protective mechanisms of the mentioned moderators would work in other samples and across various circumstances. Among these moderating factors are higher self-esteem, greater psychological flexibility and acceptance of difficult experience, higher meaning in life and self-control, less digital emotion contagion, higher age, male gender and lower COVID-19 stress, emotion regulation by cognitive reappraisal strategies, increased resilience, trust in the healthcare system, identifying positive over negative aspects of COVID-19 lockdown, as well as utilizing prenatal care services. Until now, several factors were found to serve as resources buffering the effects of stressors, stressful experiences or risk factors on mental health or protective health promoting behaviour during the first year of the pandemic. Research on resilience and resources will help inform public health measures and interventions to improve coping with stressful experience during the current pandemic and its aftermath, and it will provide important insights for dealing with future crises. In particular, there is a need for investigations into resilience factors and resources that can buffer the effect of acute COVID-19 stress on mental distress. While there is ample evidence that higher COVID-19 stress is significantly related to symptoms of mental distress, we do not know much about factors influencing this relationship. These COVID-19 stress scales primarily assess symptoms of anxiety and fears associated with COVID-19, but also various other facets of stress experience during the pandemic, such as feeling restricted by lockdown measures, uncertainty and doubts of how to protect oneself and loved ones against infections, sleep disturbance, confusion, frustration, anger, loneliness, social isolation, and fears of the future. Thus, several scales were developed to measure stress specifically due to the pandemic. Researchers observed that people experienced not only mental distress but also stress that was directly related to the pandemic and its aftermath. ![]() Numerous studies found that mental distress has substantially increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and first systematic reviews and meta-analyses reported prevalence rates ranging from 21.8 to 33.0%, from 22.0 to 33.7%, and from 34.4 to 41.1%, for clinically relevant anxiety, depression, and general mental distress, respectively. The prevention of mental distress may be supported by enabling a sense of control through citizen participation in policy decisions and transparent explanation in their implementation. The data suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is easier to bear for people who, despite pandemic-related strains, feel that they generally have influence over their own lives.Īn external locus of control, conversely, is associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety. LoC I served as a buffer ( p < .001), and LoC E exacerbated (p < .001) the relation between COVID-19 stress and general mental distress. In both samples, LoC showed substantial moderation effects. The association between COVID-19 stress and general mental distress was strong (r = .61 and r = .55 for the Norwegian and the German-speaking sample, respectively). Moderation analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macro for SPSS. ![]() We measured LoC with the Locus of Control-4 Scale (IE-4), COVID-19 stress with a scale developed for this purpose, and mental distress with the Patient Health Questionnaire 4 (PHQ-4). This cross-sectional survey study analysed data from a Norwegian ( n = 1225) and a German-speaking sample ( n = 1527). This study investigated whether LoC I and LoC E moderated the relationship between COVID-19 stress and general mental distress in the general population during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. An internal locus of control (LoC I) refers to the belief that the outcome of events in one’s life is contingent upon one’s actions, whereas an external locus of control (LoC E) describes the belief that chance and powerful others control one’s life. ![]()
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