Lockdown measures during Covid-19 outbreak: which relationship with environmental mastery and purpose of life?

Recent Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has required lockdown measures, producing downtime and depriving individual lives of their usual meanings. Due to these broad restrictions, individuals have experienced several emotional and psychosocial difficulties, among which loss of meaning and purpose of their lives and lack of power in managing daily tasks and routines strongly stem. However, a clear awareness of the rationale for lockdown measures could have represented a protective factor (Brooks et al., 2020; Reynolds et al., 2008); individual and community resilience could have represented characteristics enhancing its role, since individuals had to adapt to these changes individually but also as a community. An online questionnaire was administered to 350 Italian citizens during the first National lockdown in Italy. Moderation analyses showed that the awareness about the rationale for lockdown measures rather enhanced the lack of purpose of life and that individual resilience only exerted a direct positive effect on environmental mastery, while community resilience moderated the relationships of the awareness about the rationale for lockdown measures with both environmental mastery and purpose of life. Meaning lockdown measures as needed to protect individuals and communities from COVID-19 has produced a bewilderment for individuals, who perceived their life goals and activities as no more meaningful regardless of their ability to overcome hard times, which could instead ease the lack of environmental mastery. However, in more resilient communities, meaning lockdown measures as useful and protective eases the lack of purpose of life and exert a less detrimental role as to environmental mastery.