![]() “Dysfunctional fear”, by contrast, involves people worrying about crime and reporting that their quality of life is negatively affected by this worry and/or their precautionary behaviour. The type of worry that helps people to develop coping strategies has been described in the fear of crime literature as “functional fear” people use adaptive emotions and precautionary activities to help guard themselves against the cause of their worry (Jackson and Gray 2010). Yet, worry can also stimulate care and precaution. ![]() In and of itself, worry (thinking and feeling anxious about actual or potential problems) can damage people’s mental health and quality of life. It may also be related to reluctance to re-engage with economic and social activities as lockdown eases (Shaw et al. 2020) and higher levels of prejudice (Lin 2020 Roy et al. Worry about catching COVID-19 has been associated with negative outcomes such as poor mental health (Sloan et al. 2020), Germany (Gerhold 2020), Iran (Ahorsu et al. One consequence has been the surge of public anxieties and worries in some parts of the world (Lin 2020), with significant levels of fear of catching COVID-19 being recorded in the UK (Fancourt et al. The 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has affected many aspects of life globally. We conclude with some thoughts on the applicability of our measurement scheme for future research. This finding informs what sort of content-targeted messaging aimed at reducing dysfunctional worry might wish to promote. Finally, we show a difference between the dysfunctionally worried compared with functional and unworried groups in perceptions of risk (differentiating between likelihood, control and consequence). ![]() We find no difference between groups in compliance and willingness to re-engage in social life. Analysing data from two waves of a longitudinal panel study of over 1000 individuals living in ten cities in England, Scotland and Wales, we find differing levels of negative anxiety, anger, loneliness, unhappiness and life satisfaction for each of the three groups, with the dysfunctionally worried experiencing the most negative outcomes and the functionally worried experiencing less negative outcomes than unworried. ![]() Drawing on work into fear of crime, our classification divides people into three groups: (1) the unworried, (2) the functionally worried (where worry motivates proactive behaviours that help people to manage their sense of risk) and (3) the dysfunctionally worried (where quality of life is damaged by worry and/or precautionary behaviour). In this paper, we present a new way of measuring worry about catching COVID-19 that distinguishes between worry as a negative experience that damages people’s quality of life (dysfunctional) and worry as an adaptive experience that directs people’s attention to potential problems (functional). Worry about COVID-19 is a central topic of research into the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. ![]()
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