The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences have put a lot of strain on the world’s population, including academics. Universities were closed or went online worldwide due to lockdown regulations. In Malaysia, the first strict lockdown started on March 18th 2020 and was extended until May 12th 2020. The purpose of this four-month study is to examine the hypothesized change in affective states among academics during and after the initial lockdown in this country. To explore patterns of change in both positive and negative affective states, we employed multivariate latent growth curve (LGC) modeling and analyzed data from 214 academics at three distinct time points: at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown, at its conclusion, and two months thereafter. While we did not observe a significant linear change in affective states, the considerable variability around the means of academics' positive and negative affective states prompted us to adopt an exploratory approach to further investigate whether four time-invariant covariates assumed to remain constant throughout the four-month study period (i.e., academic rank, disciplinary background, gender, and experience outside higher education) could account for these variations. Our results showed that academic rank significantly accounted for differences in academics’ affective states. From a practical perspective, our results suggest that policies should be revisited to increase the positive affect level as well as to minimize the negative affect level experienced by academics during any future pandemics. These policies, irrespective of academics’ disciplinary background, can be universally implemented for male and female academics or academics with and without previous work experience outside higher education. Nevertheless, the policies for high and low rank academics should be tailored to those groups.

COVID-19 大流行及其后果给包括学术界在内的世界人民带来了很大压力。由于封锁规定，世界各地的大学都关闭或上线。在马来西亚，首次严格封锁于 2020 年 3 月 18 日开始，并延长至 2020 年 5 月 12 日。这项为期四个月的研究的目的是检验该国最初封锁期间和之后学者们情感状态的假设变化。为了探索积极和消极情感状态的变化模式，我们采用了多元潜在增长曲线 (LGC) 模型，并分析了 214 名学者在三个不同时间点的数据：COVID-19 封锁开始时、结束时和此后两个月。虽然我们没有观察到情感状态的显着线性变化，但学者的积极和消极情感状态的平均值存在相当大的变异性，促使我们采用探索性方法来进一步研究四个时不变协变量是否假设在整个四个过程中保持不变。一个月的学习时间（即学术排名、学科背景、性别和高等教育以外的经验）可以解释这些差异。我们的结果表明，学术排名显着影响了学者情感状态的差异。从实践的角度来看，我们的研究结果表明，应该重新审视政策，以提高积极影响水平，并尽量减少学术界在未来任何流行病期间所经历的负面影响水平。这些政策，无论学者的学科背景如何，都可以普遍适用于男性和女性学者或有或没有高等教育以外工作经验的学者。然而，针对高级别和低级别学者的政策应针对这些群体进行调整。