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Abstract
We examined perceived threats of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and West Nile Virus using an Internet-based questionnaire. Higher levels of perceived threats of diseases were associated with increases in a variety of ways of coping, including empathic responding and wishful thinking. In turn, we examined how coping with the perceived health threat was related to two specific health related behaviours: taking recommended precautions, and avoiding people in an attempt to avoid disease. The findings from linear regression indicated that empathic responding, in response to the threat of a virulent agent, was related to taking recommended and effective health precautions. On the other hand, wishful thinking was associated with those behaviours that may potentially lead to economic hardship in afflicted areas, such as avoiding people perceived to be at risk for an infectious agent. Implications for health promotion are discussed.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a SSHRCC grant to the second author, and SSHRCC and Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research doctoral fellowships to the first and third authors. We would like to thank our colleagues in the SARS Collaborative Research Group, particularly George Bishop, for input regarding the design of this study.
Notes
1. SARS Collaborative Research Group was assembled by George Bishop, with assistance from the American Psychological Society, Division 38 of the American Psychological Association and the Society of Behavioural Medicine. For a list of its members, please see Lee-Baggley et al. (2004).
2. While state anxiety may also be viewed as a dependent variable, the current study sought to examine health behaviours as the outcome variable. Given this goal, state anxiety was controlled for in the analyses for SARS to ensure that the relationships observed between coping and health behaviours were not simply due to their shared variance with general state anxiety.
3. We controlled for time of participation in the study since we included in our analyses Rs who completed the study while reports of the outbreak were still occurring, and up to a year after the major outbreak period. We were interested in whether any coping strategies had varied associations with behaviours depending on the time of participation and thus, examined interactions of time of participation with coping.
4. All Variables were centred in our regression equations. The centre of our time of participation was November 2003 (the mean approximated month six of our data), which represents the period soon after the peak of the crisis. Furthermore, we began collecting data in June 2003, month one of our sample, which corresponds to the peak of the SARS crisis. In order to calculate the B coefficient for the direct effect of empathic responding on avoiding people for the peak period and for seven months after the peak period (April 2004), we followed the instructions of Cohen et al. (Citation2003).
5. State anxiety was included as a control variable in the SARS analyses. However, given that this control variable did not alter the pattern of results, and that it was closely related to perceptions of threat, we excluded it from further analysis.