Publication date: Mar 25, 2025
The current study aimed to identify the core posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and to explore the longitudinal predictive relationships of these symptoms among Chinese police officers during COVID-19. Identifying the important symptoms of PTSS could help with informing future research to alleviate police officers’ psychological problems. In this study, a two-wave on-line investigation (4 months interval; T1 and T2) was conducted with a sample of 891 Chinese police officers who completed the Chinese version of PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5). Cross-sectional network and cross-lagged panel network (CLPN) analyses were adopted. The results showed that: (1) The most central nodes all belonged to the hyper-arousal and the negative cognition and emotion alteration clusters in both T1 and T2. (2) The strongest positive predictive paths were apparent from symptoms in hyper-arousal cluster to symptoms in negative cognition and emotion alteration cluster and intrusions cluster. Hyperarousal is the core symptom cluster among police officers during COVID-19, and it positively predict negative cognition and emotion alteration symptoms and intrusions symptoms over time. Future research could focus more on these symptoms and examine their role in the onset and development of PTSS in police officers following traumatic events.
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Chinese | COVID‐19 |
| Months | longitudinal association |
| Police | network perspective |
| Posttraumatic | police officers |
| Ptsd | posttraumatic stress symptoms |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 |
| disease | MESH | PTSD |
| disease | MESH | symptom cluster |
| disease | IDO | role |