Abstract
Following an ecological perspective, reactions to a disaster—such as the COVID‐19 pandemic—should be analysed in the interdependence between individual and community dimensions. The present study aims to analyse individual emotional dimensions (anxiety, joy, fear or depressive feelings) and their community dimensions (connectedness, emotional sharing and solidarity) with a longitudinal approach among university students from Italian universities. Participants were 746 university students at t1 (during the lockdown) and 361 at t2 (after the lockdown) recruited in six Italian universities from different areas of Italy. Comparing emotional dimensions in the two times, t2 is characterized by a generalized ambiguity: both happiness or joy because of the end of limitations and a kind of ‘post‐lockdown anxiety’ because of a sense of individual inadequacy in facing the return to normality, conducting daily activities and attending community spaces. Data confirms that after the so‐called ‘honeymoon phase’ in community dimensions (first phase of t1 time), a sort of ‘depressive reaction’ arises at t2: Italian university students seem more aware of the need for individual and social responsibility and that many events are not under their personal control. The reconstruction phase and exit from the emergency are perceived as necessary but also as a difficult and risky period. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.
Highlights
The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is an exceptional event that calls into question both individuals and entire communities committed to finding resources and strategies to cope with the contingent situation and future prospects
The present study aims to analyse individual emotional dimensions and their community dimensions with a longitudinal approach among university students from Italian universities
The COVID-19 pandemic is the largest atypical pneumonia since the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and had already affected the former outbreak's total number of confirmed cases in the first weeks of the epidemic; related deaths have exceeded those of SARS (Wang et al, 2020), with a human-to-human transmission of the COVID-19 virus (Huang & Zhao, 2020) that quickly spread to the global community (Fardin, 2020)
Summary
The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is an exceptional event that calls into question both individuals and entire communities committed to finding resources and strategies to cope with the contingent situation and future prospects. This means that both lifestyles and social relationships are changing throughout the world. The impact on the whole community required swift containment measures that entailed social isolation; continuous changes related to the evolution of the pandemic and related containment measures produced negative emotions (Blendon, Benson, DesRoches, Raleigh, & Taylor-Clark, 2004; Pfefferbaum & North, 2020). In order to express these human experiences, emotions centred in subjective experiences were represented by language (Barrett, Lindquist, & Gendron, 2007); people represent their experiences within a semantic space that includes many terms that refer to a rich variety of emotional states (Rüssel, 1991) most influenced by the situations in which they occur (Clore & Ortony, 2013; LeDoux & Brown, 2017)
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