Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak variably affected people’s mental reactions worldwide but was only episodically investigated in healthy Italian teenagers. Our aim was to investigate the emotional responses of Italian middle and high school students to the pandemic. An anonymous 10-item questionnaire was distributed in pre-selected school samples. Responders had to score their perceived extent for each reaction from 0 (lowest perception) to 10 (highest perception). A group of adults was selected as control. Generalized linear models were used to estimate differences among adults and students, high school (HS) and middle school (MS) students, and urban (U) and rural (R) MS students. Comparisons were presented as mean difference (Δ) with a 95% confidence interval (CI). A total of 1512 questionnaires (635 adults, 744 HS, 67 UMS, and 66 RMS) were analyzed. Students appeared more indifferent (Δ = 1.97, 1.52–2.41), anxious (Δ = 0.56, 0.07–1.04), aggressive (Δ = 2.21, 1.72–2.70), and depressed (Δ = 1.87, 1.40–2.34) than adults did, and claimed a higher loss of interest in their activities (Δ = 1.21, 0.72–1.70). Students were less disbelieving (Δ = −0.93, −1.50–0.35) and feared for their loved ones (Δ = −0.89, −1.40–0.39). MS students were less affected by the outbreak than HS students were. Furthermore, R-MS students were significantly less aggressive and depressed, but more indifferent and disbelieving than U-MS. Female sex was an independent factor associated to almost all the questionnaire domains. The pattern of the psychological responses to the pandemic in Italian students proved multifaceted. In addition to anxiety, loss of interest in activities, and depression, aggressiveness emerged as the most characterizing mental attitude in response to the pandemic.
Highlights
IntroductionThe mental impact of the COVID-19 outbreak was widely investigated in general populations; the majority of studies available in the literature mainly focused on specific clusters of adult subjects identified at higher risk: the elderly [2,3,4], pre-existing psychiatric patients [5,6,7,8,9,10], health care workers [11,12,13,14,15], persons in detention [16,17], migrants [18], and university students [19,20,21]
The results showed that within the post-traumatic stress disorder framework, and avoidance) and the fear of COVID-19 and mental health [39]
The results showed hyperarousal compared with avoidance mediated the relationship between intrusion and that within the post-traumatic stress disorder framework, hyperarousal compared with the analyzed outcomes
Summary
The mental impact of the COVID-19 outbreak was widely investigated in general populations; the majority of studies available in the literature mainly focused on specific clusters of adult subjects identified at higher risk: the elderly [2,3,4], pre-existing psychiatric patients [5,6,7,8,9,10], health care workers [11,12,13,14,15], persons in detention [16,17], migrants [18], and university students [19,20,21]. Children 2022, 9, 59 higher prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents [34,35,36], in females [27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38], together with a high risk of their negative coping [26]
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