Abstract
Since the WHO designated the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic in March 2020, Spain is one of the top ten countries around the world with the highest number of infected people. The COVID-19 pandemic not only damages individuals’ physical but also psychological health, increasing the probability of developing mental health problems. The exposure of the population to the substantial psychosocial stress that the COVID-19 represents seems to lead them to experience lower feelings of life satisfaction and higher levels of state anxiety and death anxiety, especially among women, younger people and those with a lower resilience capacity. Despite their usefulness in intervention terms, data at this level on Spanish residents are still scarce. This study aims to explore the relations among age, gender, levels of resilience and mental health in a sample made up of 195 Spanish adults. It was conducted within three months from the state of alarm declared in Spain on 14 March 2020. Nonparametric tests conducted indicated that younger people experienced higher levels of death anxiety, and lower feelings of satisfaction with life. Moreover, younger women have less resilience. Taken as a whole, these findings suggest the importance of developing interventions that incorporate, especially among younger women, the strengthening of such a key personal resource as resilience capacity.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic is probably the greatest challenge that humanity at a global level has had, and still will have, to face in these first decades of the 21st century
When comparing the three age groups composed of emerging adults, early adults, and middle adults, respectively, significant differences were found in life satisfaction, trait and state anxiety, and death anxiety
The present study explored the relations among age, gender, levels of resilience and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spanish adults
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic is probably the greatest challenge that humanity at a global level has had, and still will have, to face in these first decades of the 21st century. Since the declaration of the state of alarm on 14 March 2020, Spanish citizens’ everyday lives are not the same in areas so diverse and key for optimal human functioning as work situations, family income and dynamics, daily and social routines, leisure options and so on. Such a plethora of dramatic changes derived from the COVID-19 pandemic can significantly harm psychological health, increasing the proneness of people to developing mental health problems. Across the world a growing body of research has demonstrated the negative psychological consequences of this pandemic for individual psychological health, due to symptoms of posttraumatic stress, depression, and anxiety, as well as lower feelings of life satisfaction and an increased fear of death and death anxiety [2,3,4,5]
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