Introduction: The present study investigates the lockdown experience in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic within a positive psychology framework, focusing on the protective role of the positive anticipatory states: optimism and hope. Aims: The aims were to verify if and how optimism and hope influenced people’s psychological wellbeing and their risk perception of the situation, addressing how individuals portrayed the present and how they imagined the future after the lockdown. Methods: Based on the differences between the two constructs, as from the literature, the hypothesis is that individuals with higher levels of optimism would report positive but hazy future scenarios and lower levels of risk perception about the future. Therefore 1,471 participants received an online survey, which was administered as a set of questionnaires investigating three areas: demographic information, psychological wellbeing, and risk of contagion perception. Results: The results showed that positive anticipatory states are positively associated with psychological wellbeing. Moreover, the results highlighted the relationship between optimism and risk perception regarding future scenarios. Conclusions: The presented predictive model demonstrated that positive anticipatory states, sex, and age had a central role in determining the psychological wellbeing during the first wave of the pandemic events in Italy. Practical implications are discussed.
BackgroundThe aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between certainty, positive anticipatory states, and positive feelings by analyzing written narratives collected during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in April 2020.MethodsA total of 1,090 Italian participants were asked to write two narratives (one about the present and one about their representation of the future). The corpus was analyzed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software package.ResultsResults showed that during the acute phase of COVID-19, people felt more certainty about the present than about the future. In particular, the appraisal dimension of certainty influenced the elicitation of positive feelings through the effect of positive anticipatory states. People with high levels of certainty about the future experienced positive feelings more frequently. The results also suggest that people find it easier to focus on the present moment and experience positive feelings rather than try to predict the future and generate positive feelings based on those predictions.ConclusionsThe study is significant, as it is the first to investigate whether certainty may be a strategy for regulating the specific stressor represented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The results highlighted the importance of certainty in coping with environmental threats and stressors.
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