Does anyone still remember the initial phase of the Corona pandemic in 2020? When shops, restaurants, cinemas, and theatres remained closed. When meetings with friends and relatives were prohibited. When school lessons needed to happen at home in the youngsters’s rooms. When there was no doubt of traveling.

Presently, most individuals appear to have long forgotten these times. Yet, the varied corona measures taken by politicians are prone to have caused enormous stress for a lot of. The fear for the job, the concern about sick relatives, the nervous strain when parents and youngsters sit together in a small apartment and must reconcile home office and homeschooling: All this has not remained without effects, as quite a few studies show.

The crucial factor is anxiety

How and to what extent have these experiences affected the mental health and quality of lifetime of ladies and men in the primary yr of the COVID-19 pandemic? This has been investigated by a research team of the University and the University Hospital Würzburg.

Intimately, the scientists were curious about the connection between worries concerning the workplace and about other individuals with an individual’s own mental health problems comparable to anxiety and depression and with their quality of life basically, how these are influenced by the support from friends or at work – and whether the outcomes show differences between men and girls.

The findings are unambiguous: on this complex of various variables and influencing aspects, anxiety plays a central part. There are, nevertheless, distinct gender-specific differences:

In men, anxiety increases together with concerns concerning the job, an effect which doesn’t show in women. Then again, we were capable of register a rise in anxiety levels in women parallel to a rise of their worries about family and friends.”

Grit Hein, Professor of Translational Social Neuroscience, Clinic and Polyclinic for Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapym, University Hospital

As well as, the study shows that ladies in such times respond positively to support from family and friends by experiencing enhanced quality of life. In men, this phenomenon didn’t present itself.

Data on the influence of gender were lacking

Grit Hein is Professor of Translational Social Neuroscience on the Clinic and Polyclinic for Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy on the University Hospital. She and her postdoc Martin Weiβ led the study, the outcomes of which have now been published within the journal Scientific Reports.

“Up to now, quite a few studies have investigated the influence of psychosocial aspects comparable to support from friends and colleagues and financial, skilled or personal worries on mental health and the standard of life. Yet, data on whether these correlations are the identical for men and girls were lacking,” says Grit Hein, explaining the background to the study. Broadening earlier studies, the Würzburg research team has subsequently now examined the influence of those aspects in relation to gender.

A study with around 2,900 participants

The team obtained the relevant information from a big group of test subjects: the participants of the so-called STAAB study. This study comprises a cohort of around 5,000 randomly chosen volunteers from the final population of Würzburg and originally focused on the event of cardiovascular diseases. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, this system was spontaneously expanded to incorporate the psychosocial impacts of the pandemic, the lockdown, and other unwanted effects.

A complete of two,890 people (1,520 women and 1,370 men) took part within the survey. Their ages ranged from 34 to 85 years, with a median of 60 years. Between June and October 2020, that they had to fill out an intensive questionnaire about their mental health. Amongst other things, they were asked to offer details about how strongly they felt supported by their social environment, their colleagues and superiors, and whether or not they had someone with whom they might discuss their problems.

They were also asked to what extent bans on the contact with parents and grandparents burdened them and the way much stress they felt at work or in school. Financial problems or worries about them were the topic of further questions.

To judge the info, Hein and her team used a special method: the so-called network evaluation. “Analyses based on a network approach enable a graphical representation of all variables as individual nodes,” Hein explains. Thus, it is feasible to discover variables which are particularly related to other variables. The network can, for instance, show complex relationships between symptoms of various mental disorders and thus explain possible comorbidities.

Results fit traditional gender norms

Grit Hein and Martin Weiβ were hardly surprised by the outcomes. “The commentary that men are more strongly related to work and girls more strongly with family and friends may be traced back to traditional gender norms and roles,” Hein explains. Hence, men often feel more affected by job insecurity and unemployment, which ends up in higher psychological stress. Women, however, experience more strain after they feel that they’re neglecting their family.

It is usually plausible that ladies cope higher psychologically after they receive support from family and friends: “That is in step with the standard female family role, which incorporates a stronger tendency to keep up close social contacts and to hunt social support as a way to reduce stress and increase well-being,” says Hein.

Regardless that these findings are unambiguous, the study leaders point to a lot of limitations. An important: “For the reason that COVID-19 pandemic presented a really specific context, it stays to be clarified whether our results are transferable to general pandemic-independent situations.” One finding, nevertheless, is indisputable: “Our results underline the necessity to think about social points in therapeutic interventions as a way to improve the mental health of ladies and men.”