Staying ‘in sync’ with others during COVID-19: Perceived positivity resonance mediates cross-sectional and longitudinal links between trait resilience and mental health

ABSTRACT

Shared positive emotions involving caring and synchrony – termed ‘positivity resonance’ – are associated with mental health. We hypothesized that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, individual differences in trait resilience would be linked with better overall mental health in part because those higher in trait resilience experience more positivity resonance. We surveyed respondents nationally in April and May of 2020 (total N = 1,059), during pervasive stay-at-home orders. Participants completed self-reports of trait resilience and mental health and used the Day Reconstruction Method to describe their social and emotional experiences. Structural equation models showed perceived positivity resonance to mediate the links between trait resilience and mental health outcomes. Subsequent analyses showed these mediating effects to be independent of overall positive emotion and social interaction quantity (amongst nationwide adults). These results indicate that high-quality social connection played a uniquely important role in maintaining mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Positive psychology
• affective science
• Broaden-And-Build Theory
• well-being
• social interaction

Disclosure statement

The authors have no known conflicts of interest to report.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The distinction between the positive and negative aspects of mental health is an important one. The absence of negative aspects of mental health does not entail the presence of positive aspects. The positive and negative aspects have been shown to be separate constructs (Keyes, 2007; Payton, 2009), and to display different associations with psychological processes and outcomes (Catalino & Fredrickson, 2011).

2. We use the term ‘affect’ and not ‘emotion’ when describing Positivity Resonance Theory to acknowledge that affective valence may be shared even when specific positive emotions (e.g., gratitude, love, pride) are not shared.

3. This way of presenting the three key features of positivity resonance differs slightly from earlier presentations (Fredrickson, 2013a, 2016). Previously, these were described as: ‘(1) shared positive emotion, (2) mutual care, and (3) biobehavioral synchrony’ (Fredrickson, 2016, p. 852). However, by distinguishing behavioral from biological synchrony, this updated articulation better aligns with widely endorsed theories of emotion that operationalize emotions in terms of coherence among experiential, behavioral, physiological responses.

4. We do not make use of this feature of Sample 1 because analyses that used region of the US (i.e., CA, NC, other) as a statistical covariate did not affect the results reported here. See Sensitivity Analyses for details.

5. As we do not have balanced group sizes across ethnicities in both samples, we coded race as a binary variable to achieve more robust results.

Additional information

Funding

Computed study variables and analytic code are available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/53meb/. This research was supported by funds from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, plus a Kenan Distinguished Professorship Fund awarded to the anchor author. The authors thank Kelly Tan and Catherine Berman for helpful comments on prior drafts.