Disaster Mental Health
Investigating associations between COVID-19 stressors and psychological distress in a Hispanic sample: Testing resilience and perceived social support as moderators.
Michiyo Hirai, Ph.D.
Professor
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Edinburg, Texas
Laura L. Vernon, Ph.D.
Professor
Florida Atlantic University
Jupiter, Florida
Introduction: Hispanic individuals appear to be at risk for severe psychological impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study examined the effects of COVID-19 stressors (i.e., death in the family due to COVID-19, an infection of COVID-19, and school/financial disruptions) on stress, anxiety, and depression in Hispanic young adults. The moderating role of resilience and perceived social support in the associations of COVID-19 stressors and psychological symptoms was examined. More information is needed to better support this understudied and underserved cultural group.
Method: Participants were 664 Hispanic university students (73% women, mean age = 20.2) 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 the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS; Cohen et al., 1983), Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7; Spitzer et al., 2006), Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9; Kroenke et al., 2001), Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale-10 (CD-RISC10; Campbell-Sills & Stein, 2007), and Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS; Zimet et al., 1988) online.
A series of moderation analyses was performed using PROCESS (Hayes, 2022). Two sets of dummy coding were applied to the categorical stress predictor to generate the three group comparison predictors (Hayes & Montoya, 2017).
Results: 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 family member’s death due to COVID-19 or COVID-19 infection lead to higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression on average than experiences of school/financial stress due to the pandemic (β’s > .21, p’s < .05). Among relatively highly resilient people, the magnitudes of the impact of COVID-19 infection or death on stress, anxiety, and depression were similar to those of a financial/school stressor alone, suggesting the buffering role of resilience. Perceived social support did not play a buffering role in the associations.
Conclusion: As expected, 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. Perceived social support did not appear to moderate stressor-distress associations in our Hispanic sample, perhaps because social isolation protocols, quarantine, and COVID-19 infection or death might have reduced available social support, particularly within this family-centric cultural group.
Efforts to improve or at least maintain resilience may protect Hispanic individuals from highly elevated psychological distress in response to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic or other long-term adverse situations.