The Role of Anxiety and Prosocial Behaviors on Adherence Behaviors to Prevent COVID-19 in University Students in the United States: Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: In situations of acute stress, individuals may engage in prosocial behaviors or risk-taking self-oriented behaviors. The COVID-19 pandemic created large stress-promoting conditions that impacted individuals' decisions to adhere to COVID-19 preventative behaviors. objectives: The study aimed to examine the relationship between anxiety during the pandemic and adherence behaviors to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and the moderating influence of prosocial behaviors. We hypothesized that individuals with high anxiety during COVID-19 would adhere more to preventive COVID-19 behaviors than ones with low anxiety and that this relationship would be stronger in those individuals with higher prosocial behaviors. Methods: A web-based survey was administered through the SONA web-based participant tool of the psychology department of a university in the Northeastern United States. A final sample of 54 undergraduate students completed web-based questionnaires during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, from January to May 2021, which included demographic measures and surveys on prosocial behaviors, anxiety, and COVID-19 preventive behaviors. Moderation analyses were conducted using PROCESS in SPSS. Results: Participants reported high levels of trait and state anxiety symptoms, most of them meeting or exceeding the cutoff criteria to be clinically meaningful (state anxiety: 47/54, 87%; trait anxiety: 38/44, 86%), and over 50% highly adhered to the COVID-19 preventive behaviors of wearing a face mask, using hand sanitizer, handwashing, coughing/sneezing into their elbow or a tissue, self-quarantining, maintaining social distance, avoiding social gatherings, and avoiding nonessential travel. No significant associations were observed between prosocial behavior, anxiety types, and adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors. However, when moderation analyses were conducted between anxiety types and adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors, results demonstrated a statistically significant interaction of public prosocial behavior with state anxiety (β=-.17, t53=-2.60; P=.01), predicting engagement in COVID-19 preventative behaviors. At high levels of anxiety, low levels of prosocial public behaviors were associated with higher engagement in COVID-19 preventative behaviors. In contrast, high levels of public prosocial behavior were associated with low engagement in COVID-19 preventative behaviors at higher levels of anxiety. Conclusions: These results provide information that can aid in the creation of interventions that could increase adherence to COVID-19 preventative behaviors (Reviewed by the Plan P #PeerRef Community).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".