Gratitude and future time perspective during the COVID-19 pandemic: effects of age and virus worry

ABSTRACT

The current study examined the nature of gratitude and future time perspective (FTP) during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the effects of age and virus worry on the associations between gratitude and remaining opportunities and time. Data came from a survey of a representative sample of Swiss adults (N = 1,008; 18–90 years) assessed during the pandemic in 2020. Local structural equation modeling (LSEM) was used to investigate the effects of continuous age and virus worry on mean-levels and correlations. While gratitude was unaffected by age and worry, the remaining opportunities and time factors of FTP decreased across age and levels of worry. The associations between gratitude and the FTP factors were invariant across age and levels of worry. Additionally, using previous cross-sectional data, the study found that associations between gratitude and future time perspective were significantly smaller during the pandemic as compared to an assessment in 2018.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• gratitude
• future time perspective
• remaining opportunities and time
• virus worry
• local structural equation modeling (LSEM)

Acknowledgments

Data used in this article for comparative analyses with a pre-pandemic sample is based on publicly available data from the MOSAiCH 2018 study (Michèle Ernst Staehli, Marlène Sapin, Alexandre Pollien, Michael Ochsner, Karin Nisple, Dominique Joye). (2019). MOSAiCH 2018. Measurement and Observation of Social Attitudes in Switzerland. Study on Religion and related topics [Dataset]. Distributed by FORS, Lausanne, 2019. https://doi.org/10.23662/FORS-DS-962-2

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/8z9vu/.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/8z9vu/.