Abstract
COVID-19 has led to global dramatic shifts in daily life. Following the biopsychosocial model of health, the goal of the current study was to predict people’s psychological well-being (PWB) during the initial lockdown phase of the pandemic and to investigate which coping strategies were most common among people with low and high PWB. Participants were 938 volunteers in the United States who responded to an online survey during the lockdown in April 2020. The main findings were that all three groups of variables, biological, psychological, and socio-economic, significantly contributed to PWB explaining 53% variance. Social loneliness and sense of agency were the strongest predictors. PWB was significantly predicted by physical health (not gender nor age); by spirituality, emotional loneliness, social loneliness, and sense of agency; by job security (not income, nor neighborhood safety, nor hours spent on social media). Comparing the coping strategies of participants, results show more intentional coping in the high-PWB group and more passive coping in the low-PWB group. During this unprecedented pandemic, the findings highlight that ability to sustainably cope with the global shifts in daily life depends on actively and intentionally attending to PWB by being one’s own agent for physical health, spiritual health, and social connection.
Highlights
COVID-19 has changed the lives of people around the world in dramatic ways
During COVID-19, with many businesses closing and the uncertainty of the markets and the future overall, our study found that being able to rely on a stable job was an important contributing factor for psychological well-being (PWB)
Our findings show that the strongest predictors of PWB, the ones that matter the most in sustaining people’s PWB even with restrictions and lockdowns, are a sense of agency during these uncertain times, alongside with experiencing low social loneliness during COVID-19
Summary
COVID-19 has changed the lives of people around the world in dramatic ways. On January 30, 2020, as the first cases were reported in Europe and in the United States, the World Health Organization named the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and declared it a public health emergency of global concern. Three months after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, in the United States there were 578,268 known COVID-19 cases and 23,476 deaths due to COVID19 by April 15, 2020 [2]. The numbers have continued to rise; over 28 million people have contracted COVID-19 and over 500,000 people have died due to the virus in the United States as of February 22, 2021 [3].
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