Funding: Budgetary
Head: Prof. Antoineta Hristova
Members of the team: Prof. Katya Stoycheva, Assoc. Prof. Rositsa Georgieva, Assist. Prof. Ilina Nacheva, Assist. Prof.
Victoria Nedeva-Atanasova, Assist. Kalina Popova, Assist. Prof. Boryan Andreev, PhD
Department of “Psychology” at the Institute for the Study of Population and Man – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) implemented three waves of research dedicated to stress reactions and ways to cope with it in the conditions of a spreading coronavirus infection in Bulgaria through online platform. The first wave started immediately after the start of the first lockdown in the country, while the second and third were organized in three months. In parallel, online research with the applied methodology was conducted in Sweden and China. After the third wave, the perceived risk of infection increased sharply, with 60% considering the risk to be almost avoidable. This has an impact on compliance. There was no change in adherence compared between the three waves of the study.
There is a deep divide among participants regarding the trustworthiness of information about the pandemic. This in itself makes crisis management very complex. To the greatest extent, there has been a reversal of the trend in terms of the assessment of the measures being taken by the state to fight the spread of the coronavirus, where from a strong approval in March, when 84% supported the government’s measures, it reached a 35% assessment on the positive side of the scale at the end of the period. Anxiety is back to old levels since early March 2020, when the average was 5.4, compared to the current reading of 5.55. The profile of subjects who experience high levels of anxiety outlines people who work from home, those who live in small towns and study participants who are suffering from Covid-19 at the time of the study. The study showed no change in levels of pessimistic attitudes. The gap between the reported fears of Covid-19 as a disease and the economic consequences of the crisis is narrowing sharply. The most commonly used strategies for coping with stress have not changed from previous waves of research, namely naive optimism, behavioral coping, and emotional coping.
Due to the uncertainty of the duration of the health crisis, the data suggest a need to change the communication in a sparing direction in relation to the growing number of people who have included their maximum mental capacity to cope with the stress of the crisis situation.