Abstract
Behavior contagion in social psychology studies collective behavior under certain (usually stressful) circumstances and propagation of attitudes, emotional responses, and behaviors in anxiety-ridden situations. It is of great importance to understand how behavior contagion can herald, mirror, and match the actual physical contagion of an infectious illness in an outbreak. “Emotional epidemiology” is a term increasingly used to describe studying the emotional and cognitive-behavioral aspects of a pandemic. Utilizing facts and reliable epidemiological models in public communication is an important step toward extinguishing the anxiety-inducing uncertainties, rumors, and speculations. This chapter, at the end, includes a glossary of terms that will allow mental health professionals to converse competently with infectious disease colleagues, and also help relay that information to the general public.
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Glossary [13, 14]
Glossary [13, 14]
- Case:
-
a person with a disease
- Primary case:
-
the initial person infected with a disease, sometimes referred to as the index case or patient zero
- Secondary case:
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a person infected by the primary case
- Basic reproductionnumber (R 0, r nought):
-
the number of secondary cases produced by a single infection in a previously unaffected population. This number depends on how long a person is infectious, how infectious the disease is, and the contact between the infected person and the susceptible population. In general, if R 0 < 1, the infection will die out in the long run but if R 0 > 1, the infection will be able to spread in a population. The larger the value of R 0, the more contagious the illness and the harder it gets to control the epidemic.
- Case fatality rate:
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the proportion of deaths among cases over the disease course. It can be expressed as a percentage.
- Epidemic:
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the rapid spread of an infectious disease to a large number of people in a population
- Incidence rate:
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the proportion of newly diagnosed cases among unaffected people at risk for the disease over a given period of time
- Incubation, or latencyperiod:
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the length of time between exposure to an infected person and acquiring an infection until symptoms emerge
- Infectivity:
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the ability of a disease agent to establish an infection
- Morbidity:
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having a disease
- Co-morbidity:
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having more than one disease simultaneously
- Mortality:
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the proportion of deaths due to a disease among the total population over a period of time (not to be confused with case fatality rate)
- Lead time:
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the length of time between the early detection of a disease through screening and its usual diagnosis based on clinical presentation
- Outbreak:
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the rapid increase of a disease in a population
- Pandemic:
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a large epidemic that affects several countries or continents
- Prevalence rate:
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the proportion of total number of cases among the entire population at any given time
- Time course:
-
the typical stages of illness of an infectious disease
- Transmission:
-
the spread of an infectious disease from the infected to the uninfected
For those interested in more basics on epidemiology, CDC maintains several courses on principles of epidemiology in public health practice [14].
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Duan, C., Linder, H., Huremović, D. (2019). Societal, Public, and [Emotional] Epidemiological Aspects of a Pandemic. In: Huremović, D. (eds) Psychiatry of Pandemics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15346-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15346-5_4
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