How anxiety predicts interpersonal curiosity during the COVID-19 pandemic: The mediation effect of interpersonal distancing and autistic tendency

Abstract

With the world-wide implementation of quarantine to suppress the spread of the COVID-19, people, having weathering a hard time, are confronted with an alarming state of mental health. For people who have taken self-quarantine at home for a long time, the anxiety and the new “staying home normality” may undermine their desire to seek information and thus might have negative effects on their curiosity. Here, we explored and examined how anxiety and the effect of quarantine regulations during the public health emergency predict different kinds of curiosity. With 1071 participants, we conducted an exploratory study (N = 570) and a confirmatory study (N = 501), with measures of anxiety, curiosity, interpersonal distancing and autistic tendency etc. There are three main findings in our results: (1) trait anxiety had negatively indirect impact on trait curiosity and the time spent on update of the COVID-19 information, however, no such correlation was found between state anxiety and epistemic curiosity; (2) state anxiety has negatively indirect impact on perceptual curiosity through increasing interpersonal distancing during quarantine; (3) interpersonal distancing and autistic tendency have negatively indirect impact on interpersonal curiosity. These effects suppressed the positive prediction of anxiety to interpersonal curiosity. Our research provides insights for the relationship between quarantine, anxiety and curiosity during the COVID-19.

Psychometric properties of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory-II among Kenyan adolescents

“…This finding supports those from other researchers of a relationship between the social network and curiosity (Thomas and Vinuales, 2017). Lastly, the fact that curiosity was significantly predicted by anxiety adds to recent research which revealed that COVID-19 restrictions may have affected the relationship between anxiety and interpersonal curiosity (Huang et al, 2021).…”

The Adaptation of the Social Curiosity Scale into Turkish: A Validity and Reliability Study

“…A negative correlation was found between social anxiety and general social curiosity, and a positive correlation was found between social anxiety and covert social curiosity (Renner, 2006). During the Covid-19 pandemic, it was found to be negative correlations between interpersonal distancing and interpersonal curiosity (Huang et al, 2021). In addition, the interpersonal curiosity scale was developed by Litman and Pezzo (2007), and the social curiosity scale was developed by Renner (2006).…”