COVID-19-Related Concerns and Symptoms of Anxiety: Does Concern Play a Role in Predicting Severity and Risk?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective Rates of anxiety have increased during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, partially attributable to the experience of COVID-19 related concerns. It remains pivotal to determine the implications of such concerns on the severity of anxiety as they may represent opportune targets for public health preventative or therapeutic efforts. The current study evaluated COVID-19 related concerns as predictors of anxiety symptom severity. It also assessed the relative risk associated with sub-types of COVID-19 concerns, the role of age, sex, and minority status as potential moderators; and the unique contribution of COVID-19 concerns beyond sociodemographics, perceived stress, and self-reported general mental health. Methods The data source was obtained from the publicly available ”Crowdsourcing: Impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians-Your Mental Health survey” conducted by Statistics Canada. Participants were Canadians aged 15 and older living in ten provinces or three territories. Only participants that completed the self-reported sociodemographics, COVID-19 concerns, and general anxiety symptoms measures were included (n = 44549). Multivariate linear regression was used to evaluate continuous reports of anxiety symptoms, and the relative risk of meeting anxiety cut-off levels was determined using chi-square non-parametric testing. Results Within the sample, 29.1% met cut-off levels of anxiety. Levels of coping and security (R2 = 0.205, p < 0.001), distal (R2 = 0.043, p < 0.001), and proximal concerns (R2 = 0.122, p < 0.001) were found to predict the severity of anxiety experiences, which was determined to be robust to statistical control for sociodemographics, perceived stress and self-reported general mental health (ΔR2 = 0.0625, p < 0.001). Minority status and sex were significant moderating variables, although the interaction accounted for less than 0.1% of the observed variance. Family stress from confinement, support during and after the crisis and personal health concerns significantly predicted more than a 200% increase in the risk of meeting anxiety cut-off levels. Conclusion The current study represents a novel examination of COVID-19-related concerns as risk factors for the experience of anxiety amongst a sizeable Canadian cohort. Coping and security-related concerns represented robust predictors of anxiety symptom experiences. Participants who experienced concerns relating to their proximal social groups were two times more at risk for meeting cut-off anxiety levels than individuals without such concerns. Longitudinal and evidence synthesis remains essential for identifying therapeutic targets and developing pandemic-related public health prevention and care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".