Why do people spend money to help vulnerable people?

Exploring the Impacts of Preventative Health Behaviors with Respect to COVID-19: An Altruistic Perspective

This study aims to explore the impact of gender and anxiety on various preventative health behaviors, and the relationships among these preventative health behaviors, individual well-being and depression, from the perspective of altruism. This study employed an online questionnaire survey, and 136 males and 204 females participated in the survey. The results of this study showed that females exhibited better preventative health behaviors than males, including hygiene habits, social distancing and behaviors intended to help others mitigate the epidemic. Anxiety regarding COVID-19 infection encouraged individuals to adopt hygienic habits and social distancing measures rather than to help others mitigate the epidemic. Hygiene habits improved the individual's psychological well-being. Helping others mitigate the epidemic improved the individual's psychological well-being and social well-being and contributed to reducing individual depression. However, the preventative health behavior involved in social distancing was not conducive to emotional well-being or social well-being. Affective elements are related to individual behaviors. Therefore, the use of prosocial, altruistic language may play an important role with respect to encouraging people to comply with preventative health behaviors in the context of COVID-19. In addition, it is worth noting that different preventative health behaviors may have different effects on people's mental health, especially when implementing social distancing-related epidemic mitigation behaviors. The question of how to prevent negative psychological effects in restricted actors must be answered, and the degree of life satisfaction experienced by those actors must also be taken into account.

Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice (KAP) toward COVID-19 Pandemic among the Public in Taiwan: A Cross-Sectional Study

Purpose: Knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) models are often used by researchers in the field of public health to explore people’s healthy behaviors. Therefore, this study mainly explored the relationships among participants’ sociodemographic status, COVID-19 knowledge, affective attitudes, and preventive behaviors. Method: This study adopted an online survey, involving a total of 136 males and 204 females, and used a cross-sectional study to investigate the relationships between variables including gender, age, COVID-19 knowledge, positive affective attitudes (emotional wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, and social wellbeing), negative affective attitudes (negative self-perception and negative perceptions of life), and preventive behaviors (hygiene habits, reducing public activities, and helping others to prevent the epidemic). Results: The majority of participants in the study were knowledgeable about COVID-19. The mean COVID-19 knowledge score was 12.86 (SD = 1.34, range: 7−15 with a full score of 15), indicating a high level of knowledge. However, the key to decide whether participants adopt COVID-19 preventive behaviors was mainly their affective attitudes, especially positive affective attitudes (β = 0.18−0.25, p< 0.01), rather than COVID-19 disease knowledge (β = −0.01−0.08, p > 0.05). In addition, the sociodemographic status of the participants revealed obvious differences in the preventive behaviors; females had better preventive behaviors than males such as cooperating with the epidemic prevention hygiene habits (t = −5.08, p< 0.01), reducing public activities (t = −3.00, p< 0.01), and helping others to prevent the epidemic (t = −1.97, p< 0.05), while the older participants were more inclined to adopt preventive behaviors including epidemic prevention hygiene habits (β = 0.18, p = 0.001, R2 = 0.03), reducing public activities (β = 0.35, p< 0.001, R2 = 0.13), and helping others to prevent the epidemic (β = 0.27, p< 0.001, R2 = 0.07). Conclusions: Having adequate COVID-19 knowledge was not linked to higher involvement in precautionary behaviors. Attitudes toward COVID-19 may play a more critical function in prompting individuals to undertake preventive behaviors, and different positive affective attitudes had different predictive relationships with preventive behaviors.