The Impact of Coronavirus on Staff Nurses’ Feeling While Giving Direct Care to COVID-19 Patients in Various COVID Facilities

Background: Nurses are very important frontline health care professionals as they spend more time with patients than other professionals. This is even more so at this critical time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The nursing profession is facing great challenges in coping with the pandemic as they are more vulnerable to exposure and infection with the disease. Kuwait is not spared from the global pandemic which has put the health sector under immense pressure. Because COVID-19 is highly transmissible and deadly, it poses a huge health risk to nurses and has a huge impact on their cognitive, emotional, behavioural and physical dimensions. Aim: The study aims to explore the positive and negative emotions and feelings of staff nurses while giving care to COVID-19 patients. Materials and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out. 300 nurses from different general hospitals, field hospitals, and quarantine facilities in Kuwait participated in the study. A questionnaire was used to collect the data. Results: The findings show that for the cognitive evaluation, 72% were moderately affected, for the emotional evaluation 51.3% and 44% were moderately and mildly affected respectively, for the behavioural evaluation, 66.7% were severely affected, and for the physical evaluation, 43.3% and 31.7% were moderately and severely affected respectively. Prolonged working hours has a highly significant negative correlation to emotional (r −0.165), behavioral (r −0.177) and physical (r −0.155) dimension of the nurses at 0.01 level using Spearman’s correlation. Conclusion: The study concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the psychophysical dimensions of staff nurses.

Electroencephalographic coherences during emotion identification task

Coherence, a measure of spectral similarity, may estimate cortical coupling between two EEG signals as a function of frequency. The coherence between EEG signals from different brain areas depends on the structural connection and functional coupling between two regions. The theory of hemispheric specialization proposes left hemisphere activation to positive emotions and right one to negative emotions. Other proposal is that right hemisphere activation occurs with emotional stimuli. In the present study EEG coherences were calculated during the presentation of the International Affective Pictures to 36 healthy male university students. The subjects’ task was to determine the valence of the stimuli. Base line recording were done with subjects observing the blank monitor. Our results showed higher coherences during the emotional condition. No differences between negative and positive emotions were obtained. Neutral pictures evoked the highest coherence values. These data suggest that coherences between functionally coupled brain areas do not reflect emotional recognition of the valence of stimuli, but they are internal indicators of different mental processes such as memory, mental effort and arousal. Our findings do not support the theory of hemispheric specialization, neither the theory of right hemisphere;rather they suggest a complex activation pattern that involves mostly frontal areas in connection with the entire cortex.