The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic continues to unfold globally, and its negative impact on the public's mental health is starting to reveal. Serving as reserve talents for the healthcare system, medical students are not yet professionally matured enough to face one of the worst global public health crises. This may exert increased mental stress and loneliness feelings, which in turn negatively influence medical students' future career choice. To address the issue, we conducted three online survey studies investigating how the epidemic affects the mental health as well as career attitude of medical students in China during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The results revealed preliminary evidence showing that the perceived stress induced by the COVID-19 epidemic might negatively affect medical students' future career choice, and the feeling of loneliness may play a mediating role. This study invites more attention to medical students' mental health during severe public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Background: In the face of the 2019 Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak, Chinese medical students worried about their future studies which might make them more susceptible to academic anxiety. Previous studies have shown that academic anxiety is an important risk factor for self-handicapping, but there are few studies to explore the relationship between the two which may be mediated or moderated by other variables. Therefore, this study investigated how Chinese medical students' academic anxiety is correlated to their self-handicapping in time of COVID-19 epidemic, and explored the moderating and mediating effects of hardiness and procrastination.Methods: In this study, 320 Chinese medical students' psychological traits were measured with Academic Anxiety Questionnaire, Self-Handicapping Scale, General Procrastination Scale and Hardiness Scale to explore the potential associations between these variables.Results: The most obvious finding to emerge from this study was that self- handicapping had a positive correlation with academic anxiety and procrastination, but had a negative correlation with hardiness; hardiness had a negative association with academic anxiety and procrastination; and academic anxiety and procrastination were positively correlated. In addition, the relationship between academic anxiety and self-handicapping of Chinese medical students was not only partially mediated by procrastination, but also moderated by hardiness. Furthermore, medical students who had lower hardiness had stronger direct effect, while the indirect effect was strong at high and low conditions of hardiness.Conclusion: In time of the COVID-19 epidemic, the academic anxiety and self-handicapping of medical students are influenced by procrastination and hardiness to a great extent. Thus, in addition to suggesting that more attention should be paid to the academic anxiety and procrastination of medical students, in the future, more attention should be paid to cultivating the hardiness of medical students and exerting its interventional role in self-handicapping.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the world economy and has, most presumably, exerted a great deal of stress on citizens, in turn leading to the call for timely assessments of how this period might actually impact individuals at the level of everyday well-being and in their behaviors such as consumer decisions. Through one pilot study and two online survey studies, we tentatively investigated this latter question, and demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic may increase perceived stress and impair individuals’ sleep quality, which in turn impels their irrational consumption. This research provides preliminary evidence for the impact of the present pandemic on irrational consumption and contributes to the literature on stress and consumer behavior.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only jeopardized people’s physical health, but also put additional strain on their mental health. This study explored the role of indoor natural elements (i.e., green plants) in relieving individuals’ mental stress during a prolonged stressful period. A pilot and three formal studies examined the effect of indoor green plants placed in living and working environments on people’s perceived stress during the pandemic and further uncovered its underlying mechanism emphasizing a mediating role of emotion. The pilot study confirmed that the severity of the pandemic positively correlated with individuals’ level of stress. Study 1 then demonstrated that indoor green plants in people’s living environments might reduce their perceived stress during the pandemic, which is referred to as the “plant effect”. Study 2 repeated the plant effect in a field experiment conducted in a working environment and Study 3 revealed a mediating role of positive emotion. This study provides preliminary evidence for the mitigating effect of indoor green plants on individuals’ mental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The indoor green plants placed in living and working environments may elicit positive emotion, which in turn reduce people’s mental stress. In addition, our results reveal that growth status of the indoor green plants affected the plant effect as well.
Second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) play a critical role in current treatment of schizophrenia (SCZ). It has been observed that sinus bradycardia, rare but in certain situations life threatening adverse drug reaction, can be induced by SGAs across different schizophrenia populations. However, the roles of genetic factors in this phenomenon have not been studied yet. In the present study, a genome-wide association study of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) was performed on Chinese Han SCZ patients to identify susceptibility loci that were associated with sinus bradycardia induced by SGAs. This study applied microarray to obtain genotype profiles of 88 Han Chinese SCZ patients. Our results found that there were no SNPs had genome-wide significant association with sinus bradycardia induced by SGAs. The top GWAS hit located in gene KIAA0247, which mainly regulated by the tumor suppressor P53 and thus plays a role in carcinogenesis based on resent research and it should not be a susceptibility locus to sinus bradycardia induced by SGAs. Using gene-set functional analysis, we tested that if top 500 SNPs mapped genes were relevant to sinus bradycardia. The result of gene prioritization analysis showed CTNNA3 was strongly correlated with sinus bradycardia, hinting it was a susceptibility gene of this ADR. Our study provides a preliminary study of genetic variants associated with sinus bradycardia induced by SGAs in Han Chinese SCZ patients. The discovery of a possible susceptibility gene shed light on further study of this adverse drug reaction in Han Chinese SCZ patients.
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