Effects of Fear of COVID-19 on Mental Well-Being and Quality of Life: A path analysis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been very disruptive and thus likely to result in substantial challenges to mental health. This study aimed to investigate the effects of fear of COVID-19 on mental well-being and quality of life among Saudi adult population, and to evaluate the impact of perceived social support. A total of 1029 Saudi adults with a mean age of 33.7 years (SD 11.5) took part in an anonymous online survey. Path analysis indicated that fear of COVID-19 was directly associated with mental well-being, which in turn was associated with lower quality of life. Perceived social support had more influence on quality of life than mental well-being. No direct link between fear of COVID-19 and quality of life was found. These findings emphasize the importance of having effective systems, in addition to social support, in place in order to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental well-being and quality of life.

Psychosocial variables and quality of life during the COVID-19 lockdown: a correlational study on a convenience sample of young Italians

“…Moreover, it is interesting to note that social support did not have a significant effect on QoL. However, literature reports social support as an essential resource for coping with different stressors ( Warner et al, 2015 ), including those within a pandemic context ( Alyami et al, 2020 ). From a psychometric point of view, this finding could be explained by the so-called ceiling effect ( Michalos, 2014 ), given a high mean score, low variability of the sample (social support, mean: 4.2 on a 5-point scale; SD: 0.7), together with a relatively low number of participants ( N = 213).…”

Experiencing fear during the pandemic: validation of the fear of COVID-19 scale in Polish

“…The Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) was originally developed for the general population in Iran to evaluate the emotional response to COVID-19 and it was published in the English version ( Ahorsu et al, 2020b ). Subsequently, this scale has been translated from English and validated in many languages, i.e., Arabic ( Alyami et al, 2020 ), Bangla ( Sakib et al, 2020 ), Brazilian Portuguese ( Faro et al, 2020 ), English ( Perz, Lang & Harrington, 2020 ; Winter et al, 2020 ), French ( Mailliez, Griffiths & Carre, 2020 ), Italian ( Soraci et al, 2020 ), Malay ( Pang et al, 2020 ), Persian ( Ahorsu et al, 2020b ), Spanish ( Barrios et al, 2020 ; Huarcaya-Victoria et al, 2020 ; Martínez-Lorca et al, 2020 ), Tamil ( Bharatharaj et al, 2020 ), Turkish ( Haktanir, Seki & Dilmaç, 2020 ; Satici et al, 2020 ), Urdu ( Mahmood, Jafree & Qureshi, 2020 ), Chinese ( Chi et al, 2021 ), Hebrew ( Bitan et al, 2020 ), Japanese ( Masuyama, Shinkawa & Kubo, 2020 ), Russian-Belarusian ( Reznik et al, 2020 ), Romanian ( Stănculescu, 2021 ), and Taiwanese ( Chang et al, 2020 ). Previous scale validations covered many internally varied and different in size groups, e.g., 629 adolescents from two junior high schools in Japan ( Masuyama, Shinkawa & Kubo, 2020 ), 1,700 participants aged 10–57 in China ( Chi et al, 2021 ), or 693 members of the general Saudi population who were at least 18 years of age ( Alyami et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The FCV-19S has been used in a number of published research on the relationships in terms of such important psychological issues as depression, anxiety and stress ( Ahorsu et al, 2020b ; Perz, Lang & Harrington, 2020 ; Bitan et al, 2020 ; Alyami et al, 2020 ), mental wellbeing ( Ahmed et al, 2020 ; Winter et al, 2020 ), specific phobia(s) ( Soraci et al, 2020 ), satisfaction with life ( Satici et al, 2020 ), psychological distress ( Alyami et al, 2020 ), post-traumatic stress disorder ( Huarcaya-Victoria et al, 2020 ), generalized anxiety disorder ( Tsipropoulou et al, 2020 ), resilience, self-compassion ( Chi et al, 2021 ), perceived vulnerability to disease ( Masuyama, Shinkawa & Kubo, 2020 ), preventive behavior during the pandemic ( Ahorsu et al, 2020a ), germ aversion, or even political beliefs ( Winter et al, 2020 ).…”

“…It was expected that the fear of COVID-19 would be associated with preventive behavior during the pandemic. Fear and anxiety are unpleasant emotions which have a negative impact on well-being and are strongly associated with psychopathology (e.g., Alyami et al, 2020 ). Prolonged experiencing of strong negative emotions, especially in individuals with risk factors, can easily lead to many maladaptive results, which are broadly described in the literature, also in the context of the pandemic (e.g., Li et al, 2020 ).…”

Supplemental Information 1: Original questionnaire exported from Qualtrics.

“…Moreover, it is interesting to note that social support did not have a significant effect on QoL. However, literature reports social support as an essential resource for coping with different stressors (Warner et al, 2015), including those within a pandemic context (Alyami et al, 2020). From a psychometric point of view, this finding could be explained by the so-called ceiling effect (Michalos, 2014), given a high mean score, low variability of the sample (social support, mean: 4.2 on a 5-point scale; SD: 0.7), together with a relatively low number of participants (N = 213).…”