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

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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0361073X.2023.2219188

Additional information

Funding

The first author’s contribution was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant, 430-2019-00851, (Dr. Kyröläinen, PI) and AGE-WELL Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Award In Technology and Aging. Additionally, the first and the second authors’ contributions were supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnered Research Training Grant, 895-2016-1008, (Dr. Gary Libben, PI). The second author’s contribution was also partially supported by the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), and the CFI Leaders Opportunity Fund (Kuperman, PI). This work was also supported by the Catalyst and COVID-19 funding from the Labarge Centre for Mobility in Aging within the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging at McMaster University, as well as the Future of Canada Project grant from the Wilson Foundation (Kuperman, PI). Thanks are due to Megan Karabin, Kaitlyn Battershill and Jordan Gallant for proof-reading and editing this manuscript.