Abstract: Objective To understand basic information and anxiety status of the callers seeking for help under the new coronavirus pneumonia(COVID-19)epidemic situation, and provide advices for effective psychological services in the future. Methods The callers who asked for help because of the epidemic during 25th, January to 10th, March, 2020 were selected as the research objects. Their general demographic information was collected, and the callers were evaluated by generalized anxiety scale. The data were analyzed statistically. Results Four hundred fiftyfive valid callers' information was collected during the epidemic. There were 381 callers suffering from anxiety and 74 callers had normal emotions. According to the Chi-square test, the results showed that there were significant differences in terms of gender, education, occupation, marriage, purpose of the call for the caller's emotional state(P<0.05). The female callers were more likely to have anxiety emotion than male. The level 2 people had more anxiety emotion than others in level 3 or 4. The people who sought for “epidemic-related knowledge” were more anxious than others who wanted “releasing emotions or complaining” and “information related to COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control”, and the people who wanted “releasing emotions or complaining” were more anxious than the ones who sought for “information related to COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control”. Conclusion Counseling and assistance through the psychological assistance hot line can alleviate caller anxiety. This requires us to improve the psychological assistance hot line service system further and establish a multi-department linkage mechanism to protect the public's mental health during major public health emergencies.

Key words: the novel coronavirus pneumonia, psychological hotline, callers, anxiety