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Adult - Anxiety

(PS2-57) Trends in Implicit and Explicit Anxiety Associations and Symptom Severity During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Large Online Sample of U.S. Adults

Friday, November 15, 2024
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM EST
Location: Franklin Hall, Level 4, Marriott Downtown
Abstract Text:

Background: Various studies suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to greater anxiety symptoms among U.S. adults, particularly young adults. Relatively fewer studies have investigated anxiety trends after the initial months of the pandemic, though some research suggests that, when averaging across the entire U.S. population, anxiety returned to pre-pandemic levels around June 2020. Beyond anxiety symptoms, it is also important to understand anxiety-related cognitive processes, including explicit (self-reported) and implicit (less consciously controlled, indirectly measured) associations about the self as anxious. The present study reports data collected continuously between 2011 to 2022 from a large online sample of U.S. adults who visited the Project Implicit Health website. We investigated whether between-person trends in average anxiety severity and self-as-anxious implicit and explicit associations: (a) increased in March 2020 before returning to baseline several months later, and (b) differed by age (i.e., 18-25 years vs. 26+ years, thresholds chosen a priori based on review of the epidemiological literature).

Method: 99,916 participants (age: M=27.0, SD=10.81; 76% female; 68% White) residing in the U.S. were included in analyses. Participants completed measures of implicit (Brief Implicit Association Test) and explicit (semantic differential items) associations of the self (vs. others) as anxious (vs. calm), and a self-report of anxiety symptom severity (DASS-21, anxiety subscale). Results were derived from visual inspection of generalized additive model (GAM) plots. In all models, available sociodemographic variables were entered as covariates, and raking-generated sampling weights based on 2020 Census demographics were applied to increase generalizability to the U.S. population.

Results: Contrary to hypotheses (preregistration: https://osf.io/2u65n), we observed no increase in anxiety symptom severity coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., March 2020 in the U.S.). The average strength of implicit self-as-anxious associations was increasing in March 2020, but this was a continuation of a trend that began several years prior. Among adults aged 18-25 years, March 2020 marked an inflection point whereby the average strength of explicit self-as-anxious associations began to increase. This trend was not observed in adults aged 26+ years. Notably, models only accounted for a small amount of variance in anxiety variables.

Conclusion: Among a large sample weighted to match U.S. population demographics, we did not observe an expected increase in anxiety symptom severity at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Level of explicitly reported self-identification with anxiety did increase among young adults shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this trend was not observed among adults age 26+ years or for an implicit measure of anxiety self-identification.