(PS9-C66) Pre-pandemic Intolerance of Uncertainty Predicts Covid-related Worries in Anxious Adolescents

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a direct impact on daily life, with families, businesses, and governments around the world being faced with vast uncertainty surrounding decision making and about the future. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU), characterized by a fear of unknown or ambiguous circumstances, is a theorized mechanism of the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders, with higher levels of IU being associated with greater anxiety and worry (Carleton, 2012). Recently, studies of adults have found IU to be associated with negative mental wellbeing and anxiety and depressive symptoms during the pandemic (Satici et al., 2020; del Valle et al., 2020). Given the role of IU in anxiety disorders, as well as the global uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the aim of this study was to evaluate whether pre-pandemic IU in anxious adolescents could predict COVID-related anxiety during the pandemic. We hypothesized that greater levels of IU prior to the pandemic would predict higher levels of COVID-related worries and behaviors during the pandemic.

Study aims were tested using a unique sample of adolescents (ages 12-14 years) living in New York City (the epicenter of the US outbreak in 2020) who participated in an NIMH-funded study of anxiety prior to the pandemic (March, 2018-February, 2020) and completed a battery of online questionnaires in May-July, 2020. During their participation in the original study, IU was measured using the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale for Children, child-report version (IUSC-12-C). After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the investigators invited the original families to complete a follow-up study about their experience during the pandemic. Twenty-seven families from the original sample completed the COVID follow-up study (n = 19 females), which included the IUSC-12-C, as well as COVID-specific measures including the Fear of Illness and Virus Evaluation (FIVE) child report form. Preliminary analyses show that pre-pandemic intolerance of uncertainty predicted contamination (R² = 0.245, F(1, 25) = 8.10, p = 0.009) and social distancing (R² = 0.292, F(1, 25) = 10.3 p = 0.004) worries during the pandemic in adolescents with anxiety. These relationships remain significant even when taking IU during the pandemic into account. These findings suggest that in addition to being an etiological and maintenance factor for anxiety symptoms, intolerance of uncertainty may be an important predictor of anxious adolescents’ responses to situations with high uncertainty.