Abstract
The ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in the enforcement of national public health safety measures including precautionary behaviours such as border closures, movement restrictions, total or partial lockdowns, social distancing, and face mask mandates in order to reduce the spread of this disease. The current study uses affective priming, an indirect behavioural measure of implicit attitude, to evaluate COVID-19 attitudes. Explicitly, participants rated their overall risk perception associated with contracting COVID-19 significantly lower compared to their perception of necessary precautions and overall adherence to public health measures. During baseline trials, participants explicitly rated COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, similar to traditional unpleasant word stimuli. Despite rating the COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, affective priming was not observed for congruent prime-target COVID-19 affiliated word pairs when compared to congruent prime-target pleasant and unpleasant words. Overall, these results provide quantitative evidence that COVID-19 affiliated words do not invoke the same implicit attitude response as traditional pleasant and unpleasant word stimuli, despite conscious explicit rating of the COVID-19 words as unpleasant. This reduction in unpleasant attitude towards COVID-19 related words may contribute towards decreased fear-related behaviours and increased incidences of risky-behaviour facilitating the movement of the virus.
Highlights
The ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in the enforcement of national public health safety measures including precautionary behaviours such as border closures, movement restrictions, total or partial lockdowns, social distancing, and face mask mandates in order to reduce the spread of this disease
Results from this study will contribute to the growing body of research exploring why some individuals across communities might be more or less willing to engage in precautionary behaviours outlined by their public health agencies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19
The current study used implicit affective priming as an indirect behavioural measure aimed at evaluating implicit COVID-19 attitudes
Summary
The ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in the enforcement of national public health safety measures including precautionary behaviours such as border closures, movement restrictions, total or partial lockdowns, social distancing, and face mask mandates in order to reduce the spread of this disease. These results provide quantitative evidence that COVID-19 affiliated words do not invoke the same implicit attitude response as traditional pleasant and unpleasant word stimuli, despite conscious explicit rating of the COVID-19 words as unpleasant This reduction in unpleasant attitude towards COVID-19 related words may contribute towards decreased fear-related behaviours and increased incidences of risky-behaviour facilitating the movement of the virus. In areas that are undergoing a rapid increase in transmission, community-wide restrictions through lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have been exercised in order to reduce the strain on the health care s ystem[5,7] These precautionary measures have proven effective for reducing the spread of viruses and contributed to mitigating the 1918 Influenza p andemic[8], SARS in C hina[9,10], Ebola in West Africa[11,12], and Hepatitis E in South Sudan[13]. Results from this study will contribute to the growing body of research exploring why some individuals across communities might be more or less willing to engage in precautionary behaviours outlined by their public health agencies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19
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