Emotional State of Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights from the Cognitive and Social Well-Being (CoSoWELL) Corpus

Abstract

ABSTRACT Objectives In view of the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychologists face a challenge to document the pandemic-related change in emotional well-being of individuals and groups and evaluate the emotional response to this fallout over time. Methodsp We contribute to this goal by analyzing the new CoSoWELL corpus (version 2.0), an 1.8 million-word collection of narratives written by over 1,300 older adults (55+ y.o.) in eight sessions before, during and after the global lockdown. In the narratives, we examined a range of linguistic variables traditionally associated with emotional well-being and observed signs of distress, i.e., lower positivity and heightened levels of fear, anger, and disgust. Results In most variables, we observed a characteristic timeline of change, i.e., a delayed (by 4 months) and abrupt drop in optimism and increase in negative emotions that reached its peak about 7 months after the lockdown and returned to pre-pandemic levels one year after. Our examination of risk factors showed that higher levels of self-reported loneliness came with elevated levels of negative emotions but did not change the timeline of emotional response to the pandemic. Conclusions We discuss implications of the findings for theories of emotion regulation.