Abstract
Emotional creativity refers to a set of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to the originality of emotional experience and expression. Previous studies have found that emotional creativity can positively predict posttraumatic growth and mental health. The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed great challenges to people’s daily lives and their mental health status. Therefore, this study aims to address the following two questions: whether emotional creativity can improve posttraumatic growth and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it works. To do this, a multiple mediation model has been proposed, which supposes that emotional creativity is associated with posttraumatic growth and mental health through perceived social support and regulatory emotional self-efficacy. The study involved 423 participants from multiple regions with different COVID-19 involvement levels. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire with six parts, which included Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI), Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (RES), Stress-Related Growth Scale-Short Form (SRGS-SF), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support scale (MSPSS), Brief Symptom Inventory-18 scale (BSI-18), and COVID-19-related life events questionnaire. Path analysis used to examine the mediation model indicated that under the control of COVID-19-related life events and age, perceived social support mediated a positive association between emotional creativity and posttraumatic growth as well as a negative association between emotional creativity and all mental health problems, including somatization, depression, and anxiety. Regulatory emotional self-efficacy mediates the association between emotional creativity and posttraumatic growth, emotional creativity and anxiety, and emotional creativity and depression. The results suggest that emotional creativity plays an important role in coping with stressful events related to COVID-19. Furthermore, these results might provide a better understanding of the possible paths through which emotional creativity is related to psychological outcomes, such as mental health and posttraumatic growth.
Highlights
The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020 severely impacted people around the world
The results indicated that both perceived social support and regulatory emotional selfefficacy mediated the effects of emotional creativity on Posttraumatic growth (PTG), anxiety, and depression, while only perceived social support mediated the effect of emotional creativity on somatization
We found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, individual emotional creativity was significantly positively correlated with individual perceived social support, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, and PTG, while it was significantly negatively associated with individual mental health problems, which is consistent with previous studies (Averill, 1999; Lattifian and Delavarpour, 2012; Wang and Yan, 2017)
Summary
The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020 severely impacted people around the world. It was shown that, during the outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and Ebola in 2018, both medical staff and general public were susceptible to increased risks of mental health problems (Wang et al, 2003; Waterman et al, 2018). Some researchers found that public health emergency events did harm individual mental health (Yi et al, 2010; Li et al, 2017). Studies have shown that restriction has negative psychological effects on both individual and interpersonal levels, and the anxiety and depression levels of restricted residents are significantly higher than those of unrestricted residents (Dong et al, 2020; Zhang D. et al, 2020)
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