A Multi-method Assessment of the Impact of Stress on Families’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic was a pervasive disaster, creating stress for people across the globe. As such, understanding how pandemic-related stress has impacted individuals’ mental health is vital for guiding intervention programs and limiting the impact of future similar crises. This is especially true for youth, who are at heightened risk for mental disorder and may experience pandemic-related social stress as particularly aversive, given the developmental challenges unique to this period. Although substantial efforts have been made to measure the impact of the pandemic-related stress on individuals’ mental health, the pandemic’s relatively sudden onset has limited researchers’ abilities to conduct fulsome longitudinal investigations. Longitudinal assessments of youths’ mental health, especially with shorter intervals between follow-ups, will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how youths responded to this crisis on a week-by-week basis. I addressed these gaps in the literature by developing and factor analyzing a measure of pandemic-related stress responses in youths and caregivers (Study 1), examining how youths’ pre-pandemic psychophysiological stress responses shaped their adjustment during the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 2), and by examining associations between youths and caregivers internalizing symptoms at the onset of COVID-related lockdowns (Study 3). Findings included that my measure of pandemic-related stress responses could be used similarly for caregivers and youths (Study 1), that stress-related cortisol output differentially predicted boys’ and girls’ internalizing symptoms (Study 2), and that caregivers’ and youths’ depressive symptoms influenced each other reciprocally over time, while youths’ depressive symptoms unidirectionally predicted caregivers’ anxious symptoms (Study 3). Implications for mental health interventions in the context of future global crises are discussed.