Stress Mediates the Relationship between Personality and the Affordance of Socially Distanced Online Education

Abstract

The novel coronavirus pandemic has made life significantly more stressful for large populations of people. As one such demographic, university students worldwide have experienced a sudden shift toward the provision of socially distanced online education, often in the absence of a coherent institutional plan. The mechanisms of stress appraisal and response differ between individuals in part determined by personality. With a sample of 293 undergraduate students at a Japanese university operating under prohibitions relating to face-to-face education, this article examines the impact of personality on the affordance of socially distanced online education mediated through generalized life stress and online learning stress appraisal. A retrimmed structural model returned an acceptable goodness of fit accounting for 31.6% of the criterion variance. The model indicates that conscientiousness (positive) and neuroticism (negative) hold a significant mediated impact on the affordance of socially distanced online education through generalized life stress and online learning stress appraisal. Moreover, and in the absence of face-to-face social interaction, the model shows that extroverted students experience greater online learning stress appraisals than neurotic students. Neurotic students were, however, negatively impacted by appraisals of generalized life stress but not online learning stress. Informed by personality characteristics and stress appraisals, the outcomes are discussed in relation to educational improvements and appropriate pedagogies for the delivery of socially distanced online education.