Gender and Fear of COVID-19 in a Cuban Population Sample

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global health emergency that could potentially have a serious impact on public health. Fear has been one of the most frequent psychological reaction in the population during the current pandemic. The aim of this study was to compare fear of COVID-19 between genders and to examine whether the differences between genders may be predictors of fear of COVID-19 scores. A cross-sectional webbased survey design was adopted. The sample comprised 772 Cuban participants. The Fear of COVID-19 Scale was used to explore fear reactions in the sample. An independent-samples t test was conducted to compare the fear of COVID-19 scores between genders, and multinomial logistic regression was modeling to identify variables independently associated with fear of coronavirus. In our sample, on average, female participants experienced significantly greater fear of COVID-19 than men. The gender of participants significantly predicted the level of fear of COVID-19. Being female was a predictor of medium and high levels of fear of COVID-19. The odds of a female with middle fear levels compared to low fear was 3.13 times more than for a male, and the odds of a female with high fear levels compared to low fear was 3.45 times more than for a male. Our results corroborate international research that indicate a greater psychological vulnerability in women during the COVID-19 pandemic. This result points to the need to design interventions that reduce the negative impact of the current outbreak on women's mental health.

Italians on the Age of COVID-19: The Self-Reported Depressive Symptoms Through Web-Based Survey

“…Thus, future research should include methods, such as observational methods and psychophysiological or behavioral assessment, in order to objectively record the levels of these mood states (Campbell and Fiske, 1959). Fifthly, the assessment of state anxiety could be completed or replaced by adding the specific fear of COVID-19 scale (Ahorsu et al, 2020;Broche-Pérez et al, 2020;Soraci et al, 2020). In addition, it should be acknowledged that the study was carried out was not sufficiently heterogeneous for sex, with marked female preponderance, and age sample, with a prevalence of juveniles.…”

Translation and psychometrical properties of Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS) in Peruvian young people and adults

“…En base a la evidencia proporcionada por el AFC se revisó la invarianza de medida de acuerdo al sexo, encontrándose únicamente un nivel de invarianza configuracional y métrica. Posiblemente esto se deba a una mayor vulnerabilidad a la ansiedad por parte de las mujeres en la actual pandemia, lo que ha sido reportado en distintos estudios (Broche-Pérez, Fernández-Fleites, Jiménez-Puig, Fernández-Castillo, & Rodríguez-Martin, 2020;Liu et al, 2020;Rossi et al, 2020;. En cuanto al rango de edad, se evidenció un nivel de invarianza fuerte, manteniéndose invariante la estructura unifactorial, las cargas factoriales y los interceptos.…”

Positive Impact of Mindfulness Meditation on Mental Health of Female Teachers during the COVID-19 Outbreak in Italy

“…In the present study, an 8-week Mindfulness-Oriented Meditation course (MOM, which is a standardized MBI) was delivered, through two face-to-face meetings (before these meetings were prohibited by the government due to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic) and six video-lessons, to a sample of female teachers ( Figure 1 ). Although the MOM course was not originally aimed at mitigating the psychological distress resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, as this event was unpredictable, it ended up being addressed to a class of the general population most vulnerable to the consequences of this event: many studies have indeed frequently shown that being a woman is one of the risk factors for poor mental health outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic [ 5 , 6 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 ].…”