ArticleInternational review of social psychology2023
A Threat-and-Defense Perspective on the Psychological Dynamics Behind the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Article in International review of social psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intragroup Judgements of Norm Violators Under the Threat of COVID-19.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mapping the landscape of psychological literature on threat from 1961 to 2023 through structural topic modeling.PloS one · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
In this review, we analyse the Covid-19 pandemic in the light of the General Process Model of Threat and Defense (GPMTD; Jonas et al., 2014) and describe motivational and affective consequences resulting from the psychological threat elicited by the pandemic: Covid-19 did not only abruptly change everyday life, but also confronted people with existential questions. This led to the experience of discrepancies that people could not resolve, triggering an aversive state of anxious inhibition. People were motivated to overcome this anxiety using defensive behaviours that re-establish approach motivation. Such defensive behaviours include conspiratorial thinking and increased ingroup support. While describing the pandemic, we review evidence in favour and against the model to develop concrete suggestions to effectively promote non-destructive reactions to manage affective-motivational challenges resulting from the pandemic. In a final outlook, we conclude that the evidence generated may be used to analyse and react to future crises and their related psychological threats.
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