Emotional experiences and psychological wellbeing in 51 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a significant challenge to wellbeing for people around the world. Here, we examine which individual and societal factors can predict the extent to which individuals suffer or thrive during the COVID-19 outbreak, with survey data collected from 26,684 participants in 51 countries from 17 April to 15 May 2020. We show that wellbeing is linked to an individual’s recent experiences of specific momentary positive and negative emotions, including love, calm, determination, and loneliness. Higher socioeconomic status was associated with better wellbeing. The present study provides a rich map of emotional experiences and wellbeing around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak, and points to calm, connection, and control as central to our wellbeing at this time of collective crisis.

Emotion Regulation and Wellbeing: A Cross-Cultural Study During the COVID-19 Outbreak

“…To assess wellbeing, we included two questions measuring resilience, two questions measuring eudaimonic wellbeing (flourishing), one question measuring satisfaction with life, and one item each measuring stress, tiredness, depression, mental health, and physical health (for details, see OSF). In the current project, we used the same four-factor structure of wellbeing as employed in Sun et al (2020). The four factors, each of which was defined by the items in the subsequent parentheses, were henceforth labelled Wellness (the two eudaimonic items and satisfaction with life), Resilience (the two resilience items), Health (feeling mentally healthy and physically healthy), and Distress (stressed, tired, and depressed).…”

“…The reliability of the subscales was high (Wellness: a = .83, Resilience: a = .82, Health: a = .74, and Distress: a = .82). Further details can be founded in Sun et al (2020; extended data Tables S2-S3). The same four-factor structure was replicated in the representative samples from the UK (CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.08, SRMR = 0.01) and the US (CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.01; see Sun et al, 2020;extended data Table S12).…”

“…Further details can be founded in Sun et al (2020; extended data Tables S2-S3). The same four-factor structure was replicated in the representative samples from the UK (CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.08, SRMR = 0.01) and the US (CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.01; see Sun et al, 2020;extended data Table S12). The reliability of the subscales was high in both the UK sample (Wellness: a = .88, Resilience: a = .89, Health: a = .72, and Distress: a = .83) and the US sample (Wellness: a = .90, Resilience: a = .87, Health: a = .73, and Distress: a = .86).…”

“…Recent cross-cultural work has shown that younger individuals, women, those with less education, those with lower subjective socioeconomic status experience, and those living in regions where the severity of the pandemic is worse experience elevated stress and reduced wellbeing during COVID-19 (Fetzer et al, 2020;Kowal et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020).…”

“…Furthermore, at the country level, we controlled for the gross domestic product per capita (GDP), the Gini Index and policy stringency. Countries' policy stringency toward COVID-19 was included as a control variable because it has been found to be negatively related to wellbeing (Fetzer et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2020). Countries' GDP was included as an index of country-level wealth, and the Gini index was included as a measure of equality of distribution of resources within each country, because past research has suggested that people in more affluent countries are on average happier than those in poorer countries (de Neve et al, 2018), and economic inequality is generally associated with reduced health and wellbeing (Okulicz-Kozaryn & Mazelis, 2017).…”