Worry about COVID-19 is a central topic of research into the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. 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). 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). 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. We find no difference between groups in compliance and willingness to re-engage in social life. 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). This finding informs what sort of content-targeted messaging aimed at reducing dysfunctional worry might wish to promote. We conclude with some thoughts on the applicability of our measurement scheme for future research.

担心COVID-19是研究COVID-19大流行的社会和经济后果的中心主题。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的衡量担心捕获COVID-19的方法，该方法区分了担心是一种负面体验，它损害了人们的生活质量（功能失调），而担忧是一种适应性体验，将人们的注意力转移到潜在的问题上（功能） 。基于对犯罪的恐惧，我们的分类将人们分为三类：（1）不用担心，（2）功能上的担忧（其中担忧会促使人们采取积极的行为来帮助人们管理风险感），以及（3）功能上的失调担心（因担心和/或预防行为而使生活质量受损）。通过对来自英格兰，苏格兰和威尔士十个城市的1000多个人的纵向小组研究的两次浪潮数据进行分析，我们发现，这三个群体中每个群体的负性焦虑，愤怒，孤独，不满和生活满意度都存在不同的水平，功能失调的人遭受的负面结果最多，而功能失调的人遭受的负面后果则比不担心的少。我们发现，在遵守和愿意重新参与社会生活方面，各群体之间没有区别。最后，我们在对功能的感知（区分可能性，控制权和后果）方面显示了功能障碍的人与功能正常的人和不担心的人之间的差异。这一发现表明可能希望促进旨在减少功能障碍性担忧的以内容为目标的消息传递。