RESUMO
The current study examined the effects of specific COVID-19 stressors (i.e., family member's death due to COVID-19, COVID-19 infection, and school/financial stressors) on stress, anxiety, and depression and the potential buffering roles of resilience and perceived social support in the association between COVID-19 stressors and psychological symptoms in a Hispanic university student sample (n = 664). Participants were classified in three stressor groups: those reporting a family member's death due to COVID-19 (15.7%), those reporting their own or a family member's COVID-19 infection but no COVID-19 death (35.5%), and those reporting only school and/or financial stressors due to the pandemic (48.8%). Participants completed self-report measures online. Over 50% of participants with a COVID-19 death or infection in the family reported clinical levels of depression symptoms and over 40% endorsed clinically elevated anxiety symptoms. A series of moderation analyses with multi-categorical predictors found that among relatively highly resilient people, the magnitudes of the impact of COVID-19 infection or death on stress, anxiety, and depression were similar to the effect of a financial/school stressor alone, suggesting the buffering role of resilience. Perceived social support did not play a buffering role in the associations. Family member death due to COVID-19 and COVID-19 infection had significant negative psychological impacts on Hispanic young adults. Internal personal resources such as resilience, rather than external personal resources such as perceived social support, appear to be a critical factor that may help protect Hispanic individuals' mental health from the worst stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic.
RESUMO
The current study examined attentional bias toward threat in Hispanic college women exposed to lifetime sexual victimization in childhood, adulthood, and both childhood and adulthood. Response latencies and attention bias scores were compared between victimized and non-victimized individuals. Participants were 20 women exposed to adulthood sexual victimization (AS group), 15 exposed to childhood sexual victimization (CS group), 8 exposed to both childhood and adulthood sexual assault (revictimization: RV group), and 20 not endorsing sexual victimization (NS group). They were asked to complete the dot-probe task. The CS group and RV group were combined to create the CS-RV group. Among the AS and CS-RV groups, response latencies were faster when attention was engaged to threat than when attention was engaged to non-threat. The NS group did not demonstrate such differences. When response latencies were compared among the three groups, the CS-RV group had slower response latencies than the NS group. The CS-RV and AS groups revealed similarly significantly elevated bias scores toward threat words than the NS group. Hispanic college women exposed to lifetime sexual victimization display elevated levels of attention bias compared to non-victimized women. Further, the current findings align with an integrative cognitive model for explaining maladaptive informational processing in trauma victims.