Perceived social support in the social distancing era: the association between circles of potential support and COVID-19 reactive psychopathology

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Stressors related to the COVID-19 pandemic are risk factors for psychopathology, but psychosocial protective factors might play a crucial role in buffering the pathogenic effects of the outbreak.

DESIGN

In the current study, we examined the association of inner resources and potential external sources of support for coping with the pandemic and related lockdowns to mental health during the pandemic, while controlling for sociodemographic variables as covariates.

METHODS

We tested the model in a probability-based internet survey of a representative sample of the Israeli adult population (N = 812) conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

RESULTS

Perceived support in close relationships was negatively associated with the intensity of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Larger rings of potential support such as perceived belongingness to a community and trust in government were also negatively related to anxiety and depression but were positively associated with the intensity of OCD and PTSD.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings support the "tend and befriend" theory in the social distancing era and highlight the importance of keeping personal relationships alive when facing a mass trauma.

Acute psychosocial stress increases third-party helping but not punishing behavior

Despite extensive research on the effects of stress on the brain and behaviors, there is a debate whether stress promotes prosocial behaviors, especially acute stress due to intricate costly punishment in the ultimatum game. Therefore, the present study introduced an irrelevant third party to examine how acute stress and the triggered cortisol influence third parties' punishing and helping behaviors as more convincing altruistic behaviors. The 65 participants were exposed to a psychosocial stressor (n = 33) or a control condition (n = 32). Afterwards, two third-party intervention tasks (a token allocation task and criminal scenario judgment task) were completed, during which the participants, as an "irrelevant" third party, could choose whether to sacrifice their own interests to help the victim or punish the transgressor. Participants' affective states, heart rate, and salivary cortisol were repeatedly measured throughout the experiment. Results showed that acute stress can lead to more third-party helping behaviors but not more punishing behaviors. Specifically, participants under stress tended to transfer more monetary units to the victim in the token allocation task than the control-group participants, and they tended to help the victim in the scenario task. In contrast, there was no significant difference in punishing behavior between the stressed and control participants. These findings reveal that acute psychosocial stress triggers the "tend and befriend" response, which might reflect the prosocial intuition under acute stress.