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Health anxiety (HA) was/is a common negative emotional problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the cognitive model of HA, individuals with HA continued to adopt a series of maladaptive and repetitive behaviors which were associated with obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS; including over-washing, over-checking, obsessing, and metal neutralizing). The priority of the present study was to explore how HA specifically affected OCS and whether difficulties in emotion regulation (DER) and pathological personality traits (PPT) affected the relationship between the HA and OCS. We distributed an online survey from February 1 to February 17 in 2020 ( N = 1546, with average age of 25.8, and 32.7% of males) from 219 cities in China. Results showed that only four dimensions (i.e., Nonacceptance, Impulse, Non-clarity and Non-awareness) of the DER scale mediated in the predictive path of HA on OCS, which constituted a multiple mediating model. The other moderated mediation model further showed that, with higher PPT, the more significant the impact of HA was on DER, revealing PPT's moderator role between HA and OCS.

This study explores the mechanism underlying shared syntactic representations for highly similar languages by investigating whether cross-linguistic syntactic priming is affected by language proficiency. In two experiments, native (L1) Mandarin-Chaoshanese speakers with moderate proficiency in Cantonese (L2) heard Chaoshanese and Cantonese dative sentences with a prepositional object (PO) or a double object (DO) structure, and then completed a description of a depicted ditransitive event using Mandarin. Priming from L2 to L1 was equal to that from L1 to L1, irrespective of whether the prime and the target involved cognate verbs. Similarly, priming from L2 to L1 was not affected by speakers' L2 proficiency, suggesting that shared representations across highly similar languages are insensitive to language proficiency. We interpret the results in terms of the development of shared representations for highly similar languages.

Background With the accumulation of negative emotions brought by COVID-19-related dysfunctional beliefs, individuals adopted obsessive–compulsive (OC) symptoms (e.g., over-checking the wearing of masks) and formed difficulties in emotion regulation (DER). This study focused on the temporal dynamics of the bidirectional relation between OC symptoms and DER, which had a devastating effect on the individual's mental health. As an extension, we further explored whether OC and DER and their relationship affect sleep problems. Methods In February 2020, a 14-day (twice a day, of 28 measurement intervals) online questionnaire survey was conducted on 122 Chinese adults (aged 18–55 years; 63 females). Subsequently, this research applied a dynamic structural equation model with a cross-lagged relationship and a time series. Health anxiety, anxiety, and depression were controlled as covariates. Results Both OC symptoms and DER had a significant autoregressive and cross-lagged effect. Comparatively speaking, DER was a stronger predictor of OC symptoms than OC’s prediction of DER. Moreover, both higher levels of OC symptoms and DER were related to the severity of sleep problems. Conclusions More guidance on intervening in OC symptoms and identifying emotion regulation should be added to reduce the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public mental health.