Individual predictors of vaccine hesitancy in the Italian post COVID-19 pandemic era

ABSTRACT

A wide range of survey studies have explored vaccination hesitancy/resistance during the COVID-19 pandemic and provided evidence that this can be explained by several individual variables from the ideological, clinical, and socio-affective domain. However, evidence about which individual variables predict vaccine hesitancy in the post-pandemic state of COVID-19 is meager. We administered a battery of questionnaires to a group of 120 Italian participants with high and low scores on the adult vaccine hesitancy scale (aVHS) to investigate the predictive role of ideological (i.e. political orientation), clinical (i.e. anxiety, interoceptive accuracy), and socio-affective (i.e. alexithymia, disgust sensitivity/propensity, empathy) variables on vaccine hesitancy/resistance. This study provides evidence that lower interoceptive awareness and cognitive empathy are predictors of a greater hesitancy to get vaccinated in the post-pandemic COVID-19 state.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccination
• vaccine hesitancy/resistance
• interoception
• cognitive empathy
• logistic regression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Written Informed Consent was obtained from all the participants. The procedures were approved by the Local Ethics Committee of the Department of Cognitive, Psychological, Pedagogical and Cultural Studies (Approval n. COSPECS_07_2022) of University of Messina and complied with the ethical standards of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki.

Consent for publication

Identifiable demographic information has been removed from this manuscript to ensure anonymity. Written informed consent was obtained to publish the information/images in an online open-access publication.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets are available from the corresponding author on request.

Authors contribution

CMV, MAN, CL, AF, GC conceived the study. GF performed data collection. CMV and MM performed the analyses. The first draft of the manuscript was written by CMV, with input from all authors. All authors approved the manuscript before submission.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2024.2306677

Additional information

Funding

MAN receives funding by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)— [Project Number 316803389]—SFB 1280, project A6; CMV was supported by Ministero Istruzione Università e Ricerca (PRIN 2022, NextGenerationEU. Project code: 2022L3AALJ).