Threat to democracy: Physical and mental health impact of democracy movement in Hong Kong

Abstract

This is one of the first studies following any recent political movement (e.g., The Arab Spring) to quantify distress and the associated correlates of distress among affected citizens. Perceived psychosocial resource losses were critical predictors of poor outcomes.

What predicts threat perceptions toward people opposing to the government? A population-based study following Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong

“…However, under the broad category of psychological distress, anxiety and depression instead of posttraumatic stress symptoms might be more relevant to the people's experience during and after the Umbrella Movement (Hou et al, 2015;Lau et al, 2017;Ni et al, 2017). Therefore, in contrast to earlier work on the stress-based model of political extremism, psychological distress was operationalized as anxiety and depressive symptoms in this study.…”

“…We have conducted two previous studies which also applied the COR theory to the same dataset and the same measurements of anxiety and depressive symptoms (Hou et al, 2015;Lau et al, 2016). The first study of the series (Hou et al, 2015), sought to demonstrate the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms and their predictors immediately following political upheaval.…”

“…The first study of the series (Hou et al, 2015), sought to demonstrate the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms and their predictors immediately following political upheaval. We found that a substantial proportion of people reported significant anxiety and depressive symptoms immediately following the Umbrella Movement and that these symptoms were predicted by loss of personal and social resources (Hou et al, 2015). In our second study (Lau et al, 2016), we looked specifically at how the loss of social connectedness on social media, and demographic moderators, affected anxiety and depressive symptoms.…”

“…Details on the inclusion criteria of participant recruitment, the procedure of using a Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) for recruitment, and the demographic characteristics of the current population-representative sample of 1,208 Hong Kong Chinese citizen could be found in our previous studies (Hou et al, 2015;Lau et al, 2016).…”

“…More detailed descriptions and references for previous studies indicating scale validity and reliability could be found in our previous studies (Hou et al, 2015;Lau et al, 2016).…”