Psychological and Behavioral Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Greece

Abstract

Objective: Fear of COVID-19 was associated with more severe depressive and anxiety symptoms. This study aimed to explore COVID-19-related fear, depressive and anxiety symptoms, social responsibility, and behavioral responses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Greece. Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted from April 10 to April 13, 2020. Members of the Greek general population completed anonymously an online survey, distributed through the social media. Among the 3,700 adult respondents, 3,029 fulfilled inclusion criteria. The survey included sociodemographic questions, questions exploring potential risk factors for increased fear of COVID-19, questions about the employment of safety and checking behaviors, and questions about compliance with public health guidelines. In addition, four psychometric scales were used, the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S), the Brief Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) depression scale, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7), and Steele's Social Responsibility Motivation scale. Multivariate General Linear Models (GLM) were used to depict significant differences among dependent variables (FCV-19S, PHQ-9, GAD-7) and independent variables (potential risk factors, safety and checking behaviors, compliance with guidelines). The relationship between the FCV-19S total score and influencing factors was quantified by linear regression analysis. Results: Several participants reported high levels of COVID-19-related fear (35.7%) and moderate to severe depressive symptoms (22.8%), while a significant proportion reported moderate to severe anxiety symptoms (77.4%). Women scored altogether significantly higher than men. Respondents under the age of 30 reported less fear and depressive symptoms and showed the least social responsibility. Based on GLM, a significant other's COVID-19 illness, being on psychiatric medication, employment of safety and checking behaviors, and compliance with guidelines were associated with higher COVID-19-related fear. Linear regression analysis revealed that gender, age, depressive, and anxiety symptoms modified levels of COVID-19-related fear.

Mental Health Screening for COVID-19: a Proposed Cutoff Score for the Greek Version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S)

“…Moreover, cutoff points showed significant predictive power for anxiety, health anxiety, and posttraumatic stress symptomatology. The strong relationship between the FCV-19S scale and anxiety has been demonstrated in recent studies (Harper et al 2020;Tsipropoulou et al 2020;Parlapani et al 2020aParlapani et al , 2020b, proving the scale's utility in identifying stressful emotions. Health anxiety symptomatology, an expected consequence of prolonged fear due to a perceived threat to health (Winter et al 2020), was also related to a more severe fear of COVID-19 (Mertens et al 2020).…”

“…Administration of selfreported questionnaires instead of clinician-administered interviews to address psychiatric symptomatology may have resulted in response bias. Lastly, women were overrepresented, roughly comprising four-fifths of the sample, something that may have influenced study results, since women were shown to display significantly higher levels of COVID-19-related fear compared with men (Parlapani et al 2020b).…”

“…Instead of a fixed cutoff score, positive screening requires concurrent rating of at least one item from each symptom cluster with a score of three or higher. The PTSD-8 scale was validated in the Greek population in a previous study, conducted in 3029 individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic (Parlapani et al 2020b). The scale was translated into Greek according to the forward-backward translation method, following principal guidelines (Sousa and Rojjanasrirat 2011;Tsang et al 2017).…”

“…This cross-sectional study was carried out online 2 weeks after the national lockdown measures in Greece had been lifted. It comprises part of a second phase research project, following a study of the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Greek general population during the quarantine (Parlapani et al 2020b). The authors contacted one of the co-developers of the FCV-19S scale (Ahorsu et al 2020) who gave permission to carry out analyses to determine a cutoff score.…”

Attitudes Toward Using COVID-19 mHealth Tools Among Adults With Chronic Health Conditions: Secondary Data Analysis of the COVID-19 Impact Survey

“…These differences may indicate that older adults have a greater awareness of the risks of COVID-19 than younger adults. These differences may also indicate potential misperceptions of COVID-19 risk among younger populations [ 93 , 94 ].…”