COVID-19 Outbreak Enhances Making Meaning in Negative Experiences: Evidence from China

Abstract

The present research investigated whether the outbreak of COVID-19 would increase Chinese participants’ tendency of seeing meaning in negative experiences (MINE). A longitudinal study (Study 1, N = 2535) showed that Chinese college students reported higher tendency of MINE during the outbreak of COVID-19 than three months before the outbreak. A cross-sectional study (Study 2) investigated a large student sample (N = 16096) and a large non-student sample (N = 11446) during the outbreak of COVID-19 in China and consistently showed that participants who were encountering high disease threat reported stronger perceived threat as well as greater tendency of MINE than those who were encountering low disease theat. Furthermore, the heightened perception of threat accounted for the heightened tendency of MINE. These results suggest that the COVID-19 outbreak makes Chinese more likely to see meaning in negative experiences, which may provide benefits for coping.

Impact of COVID-19 First Wave on Psychological and Psychosocial Dimensions: A Systematic Review

“…Specifically, high self-control perception, acceptance, behavioral activation, and values-based action strategies resulted in lower levels of fear, restlessness, trouble relaxing, and general vulnerability [76,88]. Moreover, Meaning in Negative Experiences (i.e., the general positive beliefs about negative experiences and the tendency to actively reflect on their meaning or value), was associated with a higher risk perception that may help people in dealing with anti-covid behaviors more successfully [92].…”

“…Risk perception was investigated mostly with ad hoc measures [16,25,37,39,40,48,76,78,79,92,95,96,[98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107]109,110,[112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129].…”

Stories of Life during the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy: A Qualitative Study

“…These results also align with a study that highlighted how individuals give new meaning to mundane activities [ 34 ], and, as predicted by Buheji and Ahmed [ 35 ], many also discovered their inner strengths. As Yang and colleagues [ 36 ] pointed out, the COVID-19 pandemic improved the Chinese population’s tendency to construct meaning from negative experiences; being able to do so was connected to increased resilience, together with positive adjustment and diminished distress. Aggression was interpreted especially from the stories of those participants who saw this situation as an opportunity for change [ 12 ]; thus, said participants dynamically tried to find personal balance between energies, emotions, everyday pace, and activities in dealing with the lockdown, restriction measures, and difficulties experienced, allowing themselves to feel both pain and hopefulness, reaching out for help and support when needed.…”

“I Hate It Here”: Mental Health Changes of College Students Living With Parents During the COVID-19 Quarantine

“…Of course, people could vary in how they perceive and are thus affected by the pandemic. For example, Chinese students who viewed the pandemic as a world-ending crisis and believed that nothing good could come from it had more psychological challenges (Yang et al, 2020). It was thus expected that this unusual time of high uncertainty and restrictiveness would be conducive to mental health challenges for college students, especially when experiencing fear and perceiving the quarantine to be disruptive.…”