1. Introduction
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 virus as a global pandemic [
1]. During the initial stages of the emergency, Italy saw a rapid and massive spread of the contagion, which initially led the country to be the one most affected by the virus, with many cases and a large number of causalities since 20 February 2020 [
2]. In order to limit the spread of the virus, the Italian Government issued restrictive measures that led to the gradual lockdown of the country, with a severe impact on both the economy and general population [
3]. People were required by law to stay home, except for work and health related reasons, leaving the population to face an unprecedented situation: from literature, we know that times of economical uncertainty can have a negative impact on mental health [
4,
5].
Moreover, in the literature, we also find negative effects of pandemics and quarantine: such literature reports an overall increase in levels of distress and other negative feelings, like boredom, loneliness, and mood disorders [
6]; however, this emergency is unlike any other that we might have faced in the past. We can find a most prominent difference in the fact that, in this time and age, we can observe a large scale diffusion in the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and communication channels. This allowed for people, despite social distancing being mandatory and necessary, to still come into contact with each other. Social media mitigated the effects of social distancing, providing mental health support, solidarity, and useful information regarding quarantine and other practical measures to adopt [
7,
8], as well as the direct and indirect benefits of an extended network [
9]. In the meanwhile, people could also stay updated (i.e., informational support) on the latest news [
10]. However, this brought the risk of encountering fake news [
11] or being overwhelmed by information [
12,
13].
The COVID-19 outbreak lowered the quality of life for many individuals, both because of the virus itself as well as because of the quarantine measures that were adopted by the government, determining a lower life satisfaction [
14,
15] and lower well-being [
16]. There is also an increase in suicidal behaviour [
17] and a clear increase of negative emotions—like anxiety, depression, and indignation. [
10,
15,
18,
19,
20].
Dunning and Pownall [
21] analyze risk perception and locus of control: participants who perceived themselves as low risk of contracting the virus generally attributed this to more internal and dispositional factors. Variables that are protective against the negative effects of the pandemics are also functional coping strategies [
14,
18,
22] and social support, since it strengthens the value of social capital and brings better results on health interventions and greater adherence to social distancing protocols [
23]. It is associated with a reduction in anxiety and stress, as well as an increase in self-efficacy [
20], which, in turn, seems to be associated with an increase in protective behaviors [
24].
The total lockdown that was established by Italy, modeled after the measures that were adopted in China, has led to a gradual increase in psychological distress (e.g., anxiety and depression, which are higher than the average European epidemiological data [
25]), a reduction in overall well-being, and to a general symptomatology of Post Traumatic Stress disorder, with a plausible relation between days spent in quarantine and the amount of perceived distress [
26]. Even those who have reported a larger social support hold stronger concerns that are related to the health hazard posed by the virus, as people with a larger social network might be acquainted with a higher number of COVID-19 patients [
27]. Despite this, the population still appears to be confident and respectful towards both state institutions and the restrictive measures [
26]. However, we noticed a lack of literature investigating in Italy some variables that were, instead, highlighted in other cultures.
For our study, we decided to measure the psychological impact of the lockdown period on the general Italian population during the two weeks in which the COVID-19 emergency in Italy was at its peak, focusing on self-efficacy, locus of control, risk propensity, positive and negative affects, social connectedness, virtual sense of community, and different dimensions of well-being. The aim of the present study is to reveal the coping strategies that were adopted by the Italian population after the first month of lockdown, and their effectiveness in mitigating the impact of restrictive measures following the promulgation of the “Io resto a casa” (“I’m staying home”) decree [
28], to both understand the resilience potential of the Italian Community and design possible interventions to mitigate the impact of COVID19 on people’s well-being. We hypothesize, according to the existing literature, a reduction in general well-being in all of the dimensions that we took into consideration, as well as lower self-efficacy and a lower social-connectedness as a direct consequence of the quarantine period. We also expect to find a prevalence in negative emotions, as well as a reduced risk propensity.
4. Discussion
The WHO declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic on March 11 2020, after the first coronavirus cases in Wuhan: the emergency caused a significant impact socio-economic and psychological dimensions, in addition to the growing number of infected and deaths.
Previous studies already highlighted the impact of COVID-19 on general well-being and mental health [
16]: in line with the wide literature that is currently available about the impact of COVID-19, we found a reduction in some of the dimensions that are associated with well-being, such as Flourishing and Satisfaction with Life. We observed an impact on both, with an effect of
on Flourishing and
on satisfaction with life. These findings agree with studies that were previously conducted in China during the peak of the lockdown. Studies found a lower satisfaction with life that was presumably due to both the uncertainty of the situation and the measures that the population was required to follow: albeit useful and necessary to slow down the spreading of the infection, the fact that they’re so limiting might have made quality of life exponentially worse, as people were neither allowed to go out for personal leisure nor could some of them work at all, as many workplaces were closed down and some even lost their job [
51].
Beyond the common reference to well-being and other health related dimensions (e.g., depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety), literature has not yet investigated how the COVID emergency impacted many fundamental psychological mechanics. In particular, the agentivity of the subjects and their individual resilience perception (i.e., locus of control and self efficacy), their risk perception tendencies, their real and virtual social connectedness, as well as their emotional activation have never been studied as early indicators of well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life, flourishing) for the Italian population.
Moreover, despite previous studies having investigated well-being in the Italian population after the impact of COVID [
25,
26,
27], none of them considered the dimensions that were taken into account in our study, and none of them conducted the study in a condition of total anonymity in order to promote stronger real self disclosure as well [
30,
31]. Anonymity might also have other benefits, like a potential decrease in social desirability when replying to the online survey [
32].
According to the literature, the lockdown can be related to the perception of loneliness and boredom, which can have harmful effects on physical and mental well-being if it is experienced for extended periods of time [
52].
Collected data allowed for confirming how social isolation that was caused by the lockdown in Italy strongly influenced individuals; many people spent the lockdown alone or with minimal social contact, reporting a significant reduction in social connectedness ().
Nevertheless, unlike previous pandemics, COVID-19 happened in a world that is largely dominated by ICT (e.g., Social networks, social media...), and these technologies seem to have played a protective role in Italy, compensating for the reduced social connectedness through/by an increase in the sense of virtual community perception (.
The lower social capital perceived by respondents, combined with the uncertainty regarding the development of a cure and the actual danger posed by the illness, might explain the revealed change in risk propensity. In line with international literature [
53], for the Italian population, too, experimental data confirmed a decrease in risk propensity of around 17.4% during the lockdown.
Furthermore, these conditions should also cause the locus of control to be more external, but if that were the case, then self efficacy should also be lower [
54]. However, on the contrary, we found that the correlation between a more external locus of control and self efficacy seems to be not significant in our sample.
In line with literature, we confirm, even for the Italian population, a significantly more external locus of control. In particular, Vijayaraghavan and SINGHAL [
55] addressed such an effect as a consequence of the containment measures that were established by the the government, and the tendency to follow what government says is right in order to fight the spread of the virus, more than an effect of the reduced self efficacy. In the same way, according to literature [
55], we can interpret our results regarding locus of control as an effect of an increased perception of social support by the government.
This would be a confirmation of our data, since we observed a relevant change in external locus of control (), with it being more external than before the lockdown, and a surprising increase in self-efficacy ().
At the same time, the peculiar increase in general self efficacy, which goes against our initial hypothesis, might be explained in terms of response to the feeling of uncertainty that was generated by COVID-19 and the reduced internal locus of control. Zhang et al. [
56] underline a positive relationship between self-efficacy and uncertainty in terms of increasing self-care behaviors in specific populations who find themselves in a state of illness. Accordingly, when considering how the containment measures provided a way to increase self-care behaviours, it is plausible to interpret our experimental data in the direction of those from Zhang and colleagues Zhang et al. [
56].
Finally, the emotional activation of the Italian population seems to have increased mostly in terms of negative emotions (
). These may have helped to manage the lockdown: effective threat management strategies and health-related behaviors are sometimes created as a result of emotional responses to the problem. People experiencing a crisis build a mental threat assessment model, so that they can better understand the event [
24]. Although small, there is also an increase in positive emotions (
). Conforming to social distancing while simultaneously taking part in national identity affirming behaviors seems to have an indirect effect on positive affects, increasing them [
57]. In our case, we can hypothesize that this is due to a phenomenon that occurred in Italy during the quarantine: people started to sing and dance to popular folk songs and the Italian anthem as well as wave Italian flags from their balconies; this could have caused a similar effect to the one that was stated by Kachanoff et al. [
57]. Therefore, taking part in identity affirming behavior can be a way to cope with the isolation period.
Some observations carried out in different cultures [
58,
59] for what concern the impact of COVID-19 on psychological dimensions have also been confirmed for the Italian reality. However, this study also explored both the magnitude of such effects for the Italian population, as well as some aspects that, to our knowledge, are yet to be examined in relation to the COVID-19 emergency. In particular, we took virtual sense of community and social connectedness into account to analyze variations in social dynamics, flourishing to add further dimensionality to well-being, and GRiPS in order to obtain a general idea regarding how much people took part in health preventive behaviors or had a propensity for taking risks.
This study also presents some limitations. There is a possible selection bias due to the fact that our sample was, probably, mostly composed of digitally literate subjects that tended to have a lower average age than the general Italian population; therefore, it might not be representative of the Italian population at large. In particular, the average age is quite low, the education level is quite high, and we observed a prevalence of female respondents with a small number of divorced and widowed respondents and retired people, as shown in
Table 1: most of our sample, in fact, seems to be consisting of students and people living with their families. Nevertheless, the sample could still be considered to be quite representative of active internet users.
The COVID-19 emergency took a peculiar form on the Italian society: the Government issued strict limitations that brought the entire country to a standstill, during one of the most severe epidemics of contemporary Italian history. In general, we estimated the magnitude of its impact, and we isolated some elements that appeared to be fundamental in describing coping strategies that the Italian population took part in, such as manifestations of solidarity and national identity that spread through the whole country.
Therefore, our study could represent a starting point for developing possible interventions for the general population, and for designing social policies from now onward to mitigate the impact of future pandemics (e.g., the COVID-19 subsequent waves).
In particular, our results suggested how self efficacy and locus of control should be improved by a reliable, accessible, and effective knowledge and information support, provided by a trusted source both in terms of expertise and honesty [
60]. The quality and accessibility of provided knowledge and abilities would effectively support the self efficacy perception; while a perception of trust, expertise, and honesty for what concerns the source of information and social policies, would effectively sustain a “sane” externalization of locus of control.
Some results appear to be contradictory, in particular the decrease in social connectedness and the increase virtual sense of community. Nevertheless, a possible interpretation could be that the two dimensions, that are usually correlated, because of the lockdown and the peculiar situation un-correlated as a compensatory phenomenon strategy effect. Because of lockdown and quarantine, we can speculate that respondents experienced a reduction in social connectedness, while partially trying to compensate it with an increase in engagement in virtual communities.