Abstract
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, pandemic-specific stressors have potentiated the—already severe—stress load across the world. However, stress is more than an adverse state, and chronic exposure is causally involved in the development of mental and physical disease. We ask the question whether resilience and the Big Five personality traits predict the biological stress response to the first lockdown in Germany. In a prospective, longitudinal, observational study, N = 80 adult volunteers completed an internet-based survey prior to the first Covid-19-related fatality in Germany (T0), during the first lockdown period (T1), and during the subsequent period of contact restrictions (T2). Hair strands for the assessment of systemic cortisol and cortisone levels were collected at T2. Higher neuroticism predicted higher hair cortisol, cortisone and subjective stress levels. Higher extraversion predicted higher hair cortisone levels. Resilience showed no effects on subjective or physiological stress markers. Our study provides longitudinal evidence that neuroticism and extraversion have predictive utility for the accumulation of biological stress over the course of the pandemic. While in pre-pandemic times individuals high in neuroticism are typically at risk for worse health outcomes, extraverted individuals tend to be protected. We conclude that, in the pandemic context, we cannot simply generalize from pre-pandemic knowledge. Neurotic individuals may currently suffer due to their general emotional lability. Extraverted individuals may primarily be socially stressed. Individualized stress management programs need to be developed, and offered in a lockdown-friendly format, to minimize the stress burden caused by Covid-19 or future pandemics and to protect the most severely affected individuals from the development of stress-associated disease.
Highlights
More than a year has passed since the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus, first reported in Wuhan in the Hubei Province of China, a pandemic [1]
Given the sparsity and heterogeneity of Covid-19-specific results for the remaining Big Five personality traits, we suggest that typical associations with stress and psychological well-being may have shifted since the onset of the pandemic
Studies have shown that many people feel anxious and stressed in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic [2, 4, 6]
Summary
More than a year has passed since the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), first reported in Wuhan in the Hubei Province of China, a pandemic (on 03/11/2020) [1]. If activated over an extended period of time, a wear and tear on the body, termed allostatic load may accumulate [14, 15], leading to the development of prevalent medical conditions, such as mood disorders, cardiovascular, metabolic, gastrointestinal, and autoimmune diseases [12, 16]. To prevent such adverse health effects due to pandemic-specific chronic stress, healthcare systems need to prepare for future pandemics or imminent waves of the current one. Identifying individual risk and protective factors for the accumulation of allostatic load over the course of this crisis will be requisite to finding individualized and targeted interventions of stress reduction
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