Table 3.
Associations of Anxiety, Depression, and Psychological Well-being One Month Into the COVID-19 Pandemic (T2) With Suffering Three Months Into the COVID-19 Pandemic (T3)
| Outcome | Candidate antecedents |
||
|---|---|---|---|
| Anxiety |
Depression |
Psychological well-being |
|
| β [95% CI] | β [95% CI] | β [95% CI] | |
| Overall suffering | .16 [.04, .28]* | .23 [.10, .36]*** | -.14 [-.31, .02] |
| Extent of suffering | .08 [-.06, .21] | .19 [.05, .34]* | -.00 [-.19, .18] |
| Intensity of suffering | .22 [.08, .35]*** | .26 [.11, .41]*** | -.16 [-.35, .04] |
| Length of suffering | .09 [-.05, .23] | .14 [-.01, .29] | -.19 [-.38, -.00]* |
| Powerlessness over suffering | .16 [.02, .29]* | .11 [-.04, .26] | -.08 [-.27, .10] |
| Pervasiveness of suffering | .09 [-.03, .21] | .16 [.02, .29]* | -.18 [-.35, -.01]* |
| Disruption to purposes | .12 [-.03, .28] | .16 [-.01, .33] | -.08 [-.29, .14] |
| Threats to personhood | .10 [-.04, .24] | .21 [.06, .36]* | -.15 [-.34, .04] |
Note. β = standardized effect size, CI = confidence interval. n = 181 for all analyses. An outcome-wide analytic approach was used to estimate effects, which involved regressing the outcomes of overall suffering and each of the individual suffering items on candidate antecedents of anxiety, depression, and psychological well-being in separate models. Ordinary least squares regressions were used to estimate the mean change (β) in the standardized scores of suffering with the change in anxiety, depression, and psychological well-being. Exposure and outcome variables were continuous and standardized (M = 0, SD = 1) to facilitate comparison of effect estimates across outcomes. All models adjusted for prior values of age, gender, racial/ethnic status, sexual orientation, religious status, marital status, educational attainment, annual household income, number of household members, geographic region, number of chronic health conditions, lifetime trauma exposure, trait hope, trait resilience, trait grit, trait optimism, spiritual fortitude, and religious commitment assessed at T1, the prior value of each exposure variable (i.e., anxiety, depression, and psychological well-being) assessed at T1, and the prior value of respective outcomes assessed at T1. Models with individual suffering items as outcomes also controlled for prior values of all other individual suffering items assessed at T1. We applied Bonferroni corrections by adjusting for the number of tests involving each candidate antecedent variable (i.e., α = .05/8). *p < .05 before but not after Bonferroni correction, ***p < .05 after Bonferroni correction (the p-value cutoff for Bonferroni correction was .006 for each outcome).