Fears of COVID-19 and positive mental health: mediating effects of working conditions post lockdown

Abstract

A sudden outbreak of the current pandemic poses a serious threat to the positive mental health of the people across the globe including the professionals who are resuming back work post lockdown.  The aim of the current study was therefore, to examine the impact of fears of COVID-19 on Positive Mental Health with the mediating effects of working conditions of professionals post lockdown. Measures of the constructs were obtained by the online Google form which consists of Fears of COVID-19 Scale by Ahorsu et al. (2020) and Positive Mental Health Scale by Lukat et al. (2016), from a sample of 110 professionals aged between 20-50 years working in the state of Karnataka, India. Positive Mental Health constituted the criterion variable whilst fears of COVID-19 and working conditions of professionals were treated as predictor variables. Two-way ANOVA was employed. Results shows that fears of COVID-19 is a significant negative predictor of positive mental health (r= -0.134; p < 0.05), there is no significant difference in the level of fears of COVID-19(t= -211, p> 0.05 level) and positive mental health (t=. 618, p> 0.05 level) experienced by professionals either working from home or commuting to office every day for work and a combination of fears of COVID-19 and working conditions predicts variance in positive mental health (R2=0.036; p< 0.05). It was concluded that combined fears of COVID-19 and working conditions has an impact on positive mental health of the professionals post lockdown, but this impact is low (only 3.6%).