*3.6. Analysis of COVID-19 Anxiety and Safety-Seeking Behavior*

Table 2 also shows that COVID-19 worry was significantly positively related to safetyseeking behavior (beta = 0.37, *p <* 0.001). However, perceived COVID-19 risk was not

significantly related to safety-seeking behavior (beta = 0.01, *p* = 0.89). Thus, Research Hypothesis 4, that COVID-19 anxiety is positively related to safety-seeking behaviors to prevent infection, was partially supported.

#### **4. Discussion**

This study attempted to investigate Taiwanese people's health status, anxiety, media consumption types, subjective well-being, and safety-seeking behavior during the COVID-19 epidemic. Consistent with previous findings, the study findings showed that new media was the most common source of information about COVID-19 [22]. As Internet and mobile communication technologies have been recently and widely integrated into our daily lives, online resources have become the main way for people to obtain information [47].

However, new media, which is a product of the development of the Internet, may exacerbate anxiety during the epidemic [23]. This study found that the participants experienced different aspects of COVID-19 anxiety and that these different aspects of anxiety had different relationships with media consumption, subjective well-being, and safetyseeking behavior. First, according to previous studies, anxiety arises from the evaluation of uncertainty [25] and includes perceived risk and worry [26]. The results of this study also revealed the complexity of anxiety during the COVID-19 epidemic. In this study, COVID-19-related anxiety was divided into the following two aspects: COVID-19 worry, including worry about the infection of oneself and one's relatives and friends and worry about the outbreak and return of the epidemic; and perceived COVID-19 risk, including the perceived risk of the possibility of infection with COVID-19 and exposure to people with suspected cases and the perceived possible consequences of COVID-19 infection when going out, despite taking preventive measures.

Furthermore, this study found that, although the participants reported a low perceived risk of COVID-19, they had high levels of worry about COVID-19. Emotional responses to risky situations and cognitive assessments of those risks are often inconsistent [29]. Therefore, when faced with extremely undesirable outcomes, people will still have a high level of anxiety, despite the low probability of these outcomes [25]. In other words, when faced with extremely undesirable outcomes, the anxiety caused by the emotional response is more critical than the anxiety caused by the cognitive evaluation.

In addition, when an emotional response to risk diverges from a cognitive evaluation of risk, the emotional response is often the predominant predictor of risk-related behavior [25,29]. Consistent with previous studies, this study found that COVID-19 worry, but not perceived COVID-19 risk, was positively related to safety-seeking behavior. However, this study also found that the frequency of new media consumption was positively related to COVID-19 worry. The relationship between new media and emotional responses may be due to the viral spread of misinformation and false reports about COVID-19 in new media during the epidemic, which has caused unfounded fear among many netizens, with the potential to confuse people and cause anxiety (Kim, 2019) [2]. In addition, many netizens have expressed their negative emotions, such as fear, worry, tension, and anxiety, through new media, which, in turn, has caused negative emotional contagion in the online community [23].

Finally, this study found that the participants' self-rated health status was poorer and their anxiety from perceived COVID-19 risk was higher. In an epidemic, it is common for individuals to feel stressed [48], which leads to anxiety [17]. In particular, people with poor health are more likely to experience anxiety from the stress of the epidemic [22]. According to Lundberg (1998) [49], the degree of stress depends on an individual's cognitive evaluation of danger and potential injury. Therefore, people with poorer overall health tend to consider physical symptoms catastrophically and overestimate the risk of serious diseases, which may cause higher anxiety during pandemics [30–32]. The results also echoed with Robinson et al.'s meta-analysis of longitudinal cohort studies, revealing that when comparing mental health symptoms to pre-pandemic levels, larger rises for

depressive symptoms and those with existing poor physical health may have been most affected [14].

The study found that risk was not significantly related to safety-seeking behaviors to prevent infection, only worry was significantly positively related to safety-seeking behavior. The researchers infer that it may be related to the temporal and spatial backgrounds of the pandemic. It was before the COVID-19 outbreak in Taiwan, and therefore citizen's awareness of COVID-19 risk was relatively low. However, through media reports, people began to know the catastrophe that COVID-19 caused in other severely affected areas, and they may have started to worry about the impacts of the virus and whether it would infect themselves and their relatives and friends. This paper suggested that future research can further explore where there exist other intervening variables, for example, whether factors that the health status of participants may cause such differences.

Anxiety may further reduce well-being [7]; that is, anxiety may lead to worse physical and mental health [50]. Existing studies have demonstrated that anxiety regarding COVID-19 affects individuals' psychological well-being [5,9]. This study has similar findings, finding that anxiety from perceived COVID-19 risk has a negative impact on the well-being of physical and mental health.

However, this study found that anxiety has no significant predictive relationship with the well-being of social relationships. This may be because, even though the Taiwanese government implemented some regulations to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including delaying the start of the new semester for schools, restrictions on the number of people at large indoor and outdoor gatherings, social distancing, and wearing masks, there were no stringent restrictions on movement and no local or national lockdown [51]. Furthermore, the development of the Internet makes being online provide opportunities to connect with families, friends, and other people from beyond communities [52]. Therefore, even if COVID-19 causes inconvenience in face-to-face interpersonal relationships, people can still seek online ways to maintain interpersonal relationships. The above reasons may cause people's COVID-19 anxiety to have less impact on the well-being of interpersonal relationships.

#### **5. Conclusions**

This study revealed that new media has become the main source of COVID-19 information and the more participants searched for COVID-19 information on new media, the greater they were worried about COVID-19. Therefore, this study suggests that it is necessary to ensure the accuracy of COVID-19-related information that is communicated to the public. In particular, individuals with poor health are more likely to be vulnerable because of anxiety during the epidemic. Therefore, it is necessary to pay more attention to the anxiety of these vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 epidemic. In addition, this study revealed that COVID-19 worry is an emotional response rather than a cognitive assessment and that COVID-19 worry helps people engage in preventive behavior. However, whether anxiety caused by an excessive emotional response will cause undesirable behavior, such as unnecessary visits to emergency departments or the hoarding of face masks [6], needs further exploration.

Future studies may need to further consider participants' demographic information (e.g., socioeconomic status, gender, age groups, occupation), relevant factors (e.g., physical health conditions, resilience, protective factors, psychological adjustment, coping strategy), and mixed methods (e.g., qualitative, longitudinal) in understanding the relationships among examined constructs, and to further examine the change over time and whether the changes are persistent or short lived, and if changes were symptom specific.

This study had some limitations. Although new media, such as search engines, social media apps, online discussion boards, etc., has changed the ways we retrieve and acquire information, fake news and false reports (information) occur frequently and make people panic or cause some mental diseases, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. With the advancement of information, communication, and technology (ICT), it is important to

explore the impacts of the aforementioned issues. Hence, this paper mainly focused on investigating the citizen who mainly relies on new media channels to obtain information. The survey respondents are mostly young people, as this group of citizens may spend more time on smartphones or computers than other groups and have a high likelihood of accessing and finishing the online surveys of the present study, which is also consistent with the results of the Taiwan MOST Communication Survey Database (2015) [43]. The research results may not be analogized to other population groups (e.g., middle-aged, senior citizens, etc.). Nevertheless, this research only used the new media platforms as the primary survey channel because the researchers valued the social issues of the new media, but the derived problem is that the results may not be widely applicable to non-social media users. Thus, it is suggested that future research can investigate the anxiety, subjective wellbeing, media consumption, and safety-seeking behaviors amid the COVID-19 epidemic in different population groups through multiple ways.

Because of individual subjectivity, participants' self-reports may not reflect their actual media consumption behavior and safety-seeking behavior. Furthermore, although in a statistical sense, health status and new media use frequency can predict COVID-19 anxiety, and COVID-19 anxiety can predict subjective well-being and safety-seeking behaviors, in a practical sense, these variables are related but not necessarily causally related. Therefore, other diversified research methods can be used in future research to clarify the relationship between these variables. Another limitation of this study was that subjective well-being investigated only physical health, mental health, and social relationships. However, subjective well-being is an individual's evaluation of life conditions, and the life of human beings contains broader aspects. It is suggested that future research should continue to track the impacts of different aspects of COVID-19-related anxiety on broader aspects of life, such as the economy. Although this study had limitations, it is still helpful for understanding the relationship between anxiety and related variables during the COVID-19 epidemic and can be regarded as a basis for subsequent research development.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, Y.-F.L., H.-Y.S., and S.-C.Y.; methodology, Y.-F.L. and S.-C.Y.; software, Y.-F.L.; validation, H.-Y.S., Y.-F.L., S.-C.Y. and L.-C.C.; formal analysis, H.-Y.S. and L.-C.C.; investigation, H.-Y.S. and S.-C.Y.; resources, Y.-F.L.; data curation, Y.-F.L., H.-Y.S., and S.-C.Y.; writing—original draft preparation, Y.-F.L.; writing—review and editing, Y.-F.L., H.-Y.S., S.-C.Y. and L.-C.C.; visualization, Y.-F.L.; supervision, S.-C.Y.; project administration, H.-Y.S., S.-C.Y. and L.-C.C.; funding acquisition, S.-C.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was financially supported by the Intelligent Electronic Commerce Research Center from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan (10C0701, 2020-2021).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Ethical review and approval were waived for this study due to no relevant identifying information of the humans involved and an anonymous online design questionnaire being used in this study.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

**Acknowledgments:** This work was financially supported by the Intelligent Electronic Commerce Research Center from the Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
