**4. Results**

The characteristics of the respondents are shown in Table 1.

Two thousand two hundred ninety-one individuals completed the questionnaires, 580 (25.3%) were males, and 1708 (74.6%) were females; the mean age of the participants was 30.0 years (SD: 11.5 years; age range: 18–89). The most represented age range was 18–29 years (68.6%). Most of the participants (1136; 49.6%) received a high school education and were students (1073; 46.8%) or employees (688; 30.0%). The respondents' current locations were sorted considering territorial area: North (23.6%), Central (25.1%), and South (51.3%) of Italy. Most of the participants live in urban areas (937; 40.9%) with a number of inhabitants between 10,000 and 100,000.

Among all respondents, only 9 (0.4%) were infected by the COVID-19, and 40 (1.7%) were sure that they had had close contacts with individuals suspected of COVID-19 infection (see Table 1). Of the overall sample, 112 respondents (4.9%) and 177 (7.7%) respectively knew people dead and patients in intensive care units (ICU) because of COVID-19 infection.

Comparisons of state and trait anxiety, psychopathological symptomatology, and post-traumatic symptomatology during the COVID-19 epidemic were made with data from the general population.

The comparisons of psychological outcomes during the COVID-19 epidemic in the Italian population with data from the general population are presented in Table 2.



Considering SCL-90 indices, depression (t = 6.14; *p* < 0.0001), anxiety (t = 7.83; *p* < 0.0001), anger-hostility (t = 1.89; *p* < 0.05), phobic anxiety (t = 9.71; *p* < 0.0001), psychoticism (t = 4.25; *p* < 0.0001), and global severity index (t = 4.18; *p* < 0.0001) significantly differ from Holy's data [12], indicating greater psychopathological symptomatology in our sample.

Considering STAI indices, state anxiety appears to be higher in our sample compared to data reported by Corno et al. [22] in an Italian sample that considered the levels of anxiety separately in both males and females (males: t = 4.49; *p* < 0.0001; females: t = 9.64; *p* < 0.0001), while no significant differences were present considering trait anxiety.

Finally, PTSD related symptomatology assessed by the IES-R resulted higher in our sample compared to the data reported by Ashbaugh et al. [23] (t = 2.41; *p* < 0.05) (see Table 2).
