Emotions and emotion up-regulation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

In stressful situations such as the COVID-19-pandemic, unpleasant emotions are expected to increase while pleasant emotions will likely decrease. Little is known about the role cognitive appraisals, information management, and upregulating pleasant emotions can play to support emotion regulation in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-01, Vol.17 (1), p.e0262283-e0262283
Main Authors: Schelhorn, Iris, Schlüter, Swantje, Paintner, Kerstin, Shiban, Youssef, Lugo, Ricardo, Meyer, Marie, Sütterlin, Stefan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Affect (Psychology)
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Analysis
Appraisals
Biology and Life Sciences
Clinical psychology
Cognitive ability
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
COVID-19 - psychology
Emotion regulation
Emotional regulation
Emotional Regulation - physiology
Emotions
Epidemics
Epidemics - psychology
Experimental psychology
Female
Germany - epidemiology
Humans
Information management
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Middle Aged
Normal distribution
Older people
Pandemics
Private schools
Research and Analysis Methods
SARS-CoV-2 - pathogenicity
Social Sciences
Stress, Psychological - psychology
Surveys and Questionnaires
Up-regulation
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Summary:In stressful situations such as the COVID-19-pandemic, unpleasant emotions are expected to increase while pleasant emotions will likely decrease. Little is known about the role cognitive appraisals, information management, and upregulating pleasant emotions can play to support emotion regulation in a pandemic. In an online survey (N = 1682), we investigated predictors of changes in pleasant and unpleasant emotions in a German sample (aged 18-88 years) shortly after the first restrictions were imposed. Crisis self-efficacy and felt restriction were predictors of changes in unpleasant emotions and joy alike. The application of emotion up-regulation strategies was weakly associated with changes in joy. Among the different upregulation strategies, only "savouring the moment" predicted changes in joy. Our study informs future research perspectives assessing the role of upregulating pleasant emotions under challenging circumstances.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0262283