COVID-19 outbreak put the world under a lot of stress due to its unexpected spread. People with different levels of trait anxiety cope differently with stressful situations. This study aimed to check the influence of trait anxiety levels on pandemic psychological resilience and pandemic preparedness. People around the world enjoy engaging with fictional experiences. Such experiences provide people with simulations of real events, that can act as source of information. In this study we aimed to explore the relationship between movie genres and psychological resilience and preparedness towards the pandemic. We performed an online study with 120 participants mean age (SD) =18.36 (.73) years. The data was collected through convenience and snowball sampling methods.
The participants filled out demographic questionnaires, State-Trait Anxiety questionnaire-trait, movie genre, pandemic psychological resilience scale and pandemic preparedness scale. Our results indicate that trait anxiety is negatively correlated with cognitive reappraisal (r=-.275) and positive resilience (r= -.268) towards the pandemic and positively correlated with psychological distress (r=.332) towards pandemic. Certain movie genres were found to be significantly correlated with positive resilience and psychological distress towards pandemic. Regression analysis revealed that trait anxiety significantly predicted scores on cognitive reappraisal (R2 = .076) and positive resilience (R2 = .072) and psychological distress (R2 = .110) towards the pandemic. Further One-way ANOVA analysis revealed that high and low trait anxiety people differ significantly from each other on cognitive reappraisal (p=.043), psychological distress (p= .005) and positive resilience (p= .026) towards pandemic and animation movie genre (p=.004).