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Introduction: In addition to the health crisis that erupted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the war between Russia and Ukraine is impacting the mental health and wellbeing of the Romanian population in a negative way. Objectives: This study sets out to investigate the impact that social media consumption and an overload of information related to the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine is having on the distribution of fake news among Romanians. In addition, it explores the way in which several psychological features, including resilience, general health, perceived stress, coping strategies, and fear of war, change as a function of exposure to traumatic events or interaction with victims of war. Methods: Participants (N = 633) completed the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), the CERQ scale with its nine subscales, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), and the BRS scale (Brief Resilience Scale), the last of which measures resilience. Information overload, information strain and the likelihood of the person concerned spreading fake news were assessed by adapting items related to these variables. Findings: Our results suggest that information strain partially moderates the relationship between information overload and the tendency to spread false information. Also, they indicate that information strain partially moderates the relationship between time spent online and the tendency to spread false information. Furthermore, our findings imply that there are differences of high and moderate significance between those who worked with refugees and those who did not as regards fear of war and coping strategies. We found no practical differences between the two groups as regards general health, level of resilience and perceived stress. Conclusion and recommendations: The importance of discovering the reasons why people share false information is discussed, as is the need to adopt strategies to combat this behavior, including infographics and games designed to teach people how to detect fake news. At the same time, aid workers need to be further supported to maintain a high level of psychological wellbeing.
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The present study aims to identify psychological factors affected by the COVID-19 pandemic given the information we have about reactions during previous pandemics, which documented features of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. We investigated the relationship between health anxiety, symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, and coping mechanisms in the general population and among students. The study was conducted on Romanian population (n = 759), aged between 18-70 years old (M = 33.24), general population (n = 485), and students (n = 274). The results showed that the general population is more anxious when confronted with the new virus compared to students (t (757) = 1.902, p < .05, p = .029). Following the analysis of the hierarchical regression, the results revealed that when controlling the health anxiety variable, a high level of anxiety symptoms and stress, and a low level of depression symptoms could predict anxiety for COVID-19 (R 2 = .070, F change (3, 754) = 16.759, p Ë .001). Also, we found that maladaptive strategies are the ones which explain the relationship between health anxiety and COVID-19-related anxiety (95% CI = .011 - .057). The results of this study bring extra knowledge and shed new light on the psychological aspects of the current sanitary crisis and contribute to the understanding of the way people relate to this disease.
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Objective: This study is a meta-analysis that considers the association between dyadic coping and emotional functioning, and between dyadic coping and the quality of the relationship as perceived by cancer patients and their life partners. Methods: A systematic search was conducted in the electronic databases PsycINFO, PubMed, ScienceDirect and those peer-reviewed cross-sectional and longitudinal studies published up until April 2020 that investigated these relationships were selected. Results: A total of 1,168 studies were identified, of which 10 met the inclusion criteria (N = 1,727 couples). These evidenced statistically significant positive relationships between common dyadic coping and emotional functioning and between common dyadic coping and the quality of the relationship as perceived by patients and their partners. There was also a statistically significant positive association between stress communication (by oneself), supportive dyadic coping (by oneself and by partner), and the quality of the relationship. In addition, a statistically significant negative association was found between negative dyadic coping (by oneself and by partner) and the quality of the relationship as perceived by patients' partners and also between negative dyadic coping (by oneself) and the quality of the relationship as perceived by patients. Conclusions: The results suggest the existence of a significant association between dyadic coping and emotional functioning and between dyadic coping and the quality of the relationship as perceived by members of couples facing cancer. However, these results must be interpreted with caution due to the small number of studies included in the analysis. Clinically, an understanding of the existence of such relationships is helpful for the implementation, and study of the effectiveness of, interventions aimed at improving dyadic coping in order to improve both quality of life and quality of relationship in couples where there is an oncological diagnosis.
