The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic (and its consequences, such as lockdown and public health regimes) was a novel and stressful situation for most of people, and, as such, it significantly affected both cognitive and emotional functioning of individuals. In our study, we explored unrealistic optimism bias (the cognitive error giving people a feeling of invulnerability) and any declared preventive behaviours undertaken in order to minimise the risk of contagion. We also measured twelve specific emotions (differing in valence and origin) and the feeling of the anxiety caused by the coronavirus. The results allowed us to confirm the occurrence of unrealistic optimism bias (being significantly stronger for men than women), which correlated negatively with the declared number of preventive behaviours. Unrealistic optimism was also positively correlated with negative automatic emotions and negatively correlated with positive reflective emotions. We created models accounting for the variance of general anxiety, finding significant predictors for both separate groups of younger and older adults (negative emotions, both automatic and reflective; and preventive behaviours). However, there was an effect of positive emotions (both automatic and reflective) having a protective role from the feeling of general anxiety, which was significant for the older group only. Our findings may be a valuable cue for coping with crisis situations.
Keywords: COVID-19; automatic emotions; reflective emotions; unrealistic optimism.