Predictions of Irritability and Ego-resiliency on Anxiety and Depression in Italy during the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Mediating Role of Negative Attitudes Toward New Technologies.

Covid-19 outbreak led to an increase in the frequency of new technologies (NT) use (i.e., smartphones, or tablets) for continuing people daily activities, such as work or study, and massively affected people’s mental health worldwide, such as anxiety and depression. In this period, ego- resiliency and irritability, that are individual characteristics related to behavioral and emotional self- regulation, such as being flexible and capable to regulate negative emotions related to frustration, may have affected how people faced with pandemic challenges, their attitudes toward the NT, and then their anxious and depressive feelings. In this contribution, we aimed to explore how ego- resiliency and irritability predicted anxiety/depression directly and indirectly through the effects of negative attitudes toward new technologies (NA-NT), in three different age-groups (18-29; 30-40; 41-60), controlling for the frequency of use of NT and gender, during the first lockdown in Italy. The cross-national sample consisted of 1280 Italians (66% females) balanced by age-groups. Multiple-group mediation model conducted on the 3 age-groups revealed that a) ego-resiliency negatively predicted anxious and depressive symptoms directly, and indirectly anxiety through a reduction of NA-NT; b) Irritability positively predicted both anxiety and depression directly and indirectly through the increase of NA-NT. The present study underlined that during outbreak people low irritable and ego-resilient were prone to positive attitudes toward NT, and this was associated to low at risk of anxious and depressive symptoms from emerging adulthood to adulthood. Findings emphasized the role of NT on Italians mental health during the first Covid-19 outbreak.