Affective-Motivational States Link Threat Experience and Defensive Reactions During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic changed people's lives and came with enormous restrictions on personal freedom, greatly restricting people's sense of agency. In response, people oscillated between fear and anger. We show (N = 2125) the ways in which people restored their perceived agency that was taken away by restrictions and that affective reactions to the pandemic may have guided people's pandemic behavior. In Study 1 (n = 276), psychological threat elicited by the pandemic predicted anxiety and was, in turn, related to reactance. While anxiety positively predicted reactions increasing the success of pandemic management, reactance was related to non-facilitating reactions such as belief in conspiracies and vaccine distrust. In Study 2 (n = 354), reading about a conspiracy myth as one form of defense increased positive affect. In Study 3 (n = 213) and Study 4 (n = 1282), we replicated findings from Study 1, extending the focus to belief in conspiracies and fake news, anti-vaccination attitudes, national trust, solidarity, and mainstream media mistrust. Interestingly, in Study 4, defensive reactions were associated with more perceived agency, indicating that defensive reactions may be tools to manage pandemic-induced affect. This study series shows that a threat and defense perspective may be a useful angle to understand human behavior in times of crisis.