A repeated-measures study on emotional responses after a year in the pandemic
It addresses public mental health by identifying at-risk individuals during the pandemic, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to new longitudinal data.
This study examined emotional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using repeated measures from 1,698 participants in April 2020 and April 2021, finding an average trend toward better adjustment but revealing heterogeneous patterns with well-coping and resigning subgroups through clustering analyses.
The introduction of COVID-19 lockdown measures and an outlook on return to normality are demanding societal changes. Among the most pressing questions is how individuals adjust to the pandemic. This paper examines the emotional responses to the pandemic in a repeated-measures design. Data (n=1698) were collected in April 2020 (during strict lockdown measures) and in April 2021 (when vaccination programmes gained traction). We asked participants to report their emotions and express these in text data. Statistical tests revealed an average trend towards better adjustment to the pandemic. However, clustering analyses suggested a more complex heterogeneous pattern with a well-coping and a resigning subgroup of participants. Linguistic computational analyses uncovered that topics and n-gram frequencies shifted towards attention to the vaccination programme and away from general worrying. Implications for public mental health efforts in identifying people at heightened risk are discussed. The dataset is made publicly available.