The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic poses wide-ranging impacts on the physical and mental health of people around the world, increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners on the topic of resilience. In this article, we review previous research on resilience from the past several decades, focusing on how to cultivate resilience during emerging situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic at the individual, organizational, community, and national levels from a socioecological perspective. Although previous research has greatly enriched our understanding of the conceptualization, predicting factors, processes, and consequences of resilience from a variety of disciplines and levels, future research is needed to gain a deeper and comprehensive understanding of resilience, including developing an integrative and interdisciplinary framework for cultivating resilience, developing an understanding of resilience from a life span perspective, and developing scalable and cost-effective interventions for enhancing resilience and improving pandemic preparedness. 

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-psych-030221-031857

Cultivating Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Socioecological Perspective

Members of the Society for Research on Adolescents COVID-19 Response Team offer this commentary to accompany this special issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence regarding the impact of the pandemic on adolescents' social, emotional, and academic functioning. In addition to outlining the critical need for scholarly collaboration to address the global impact of this crisis on adolescent development, we argue that a broad investigative lens is needed to guide research and recovery efforts targeting youth development. We then use this broad lens to consider dimensions of the pandemic impact relative to developmental implications within community and policy contexts, educational contexts, social contexts, and family contexts. Finally, we describe guideposts for setting a global, shared research agenda that can hasten research to recovery efforts surrounding the pandemic and youth development.

Adolescence Amid a Pandemic: Short- and Long-Term Implications.

People often seek out information as a means of coping with challenging situations. Attuning to negative information can be adaptive because it alerts people to the risks in their environment, thereby preparing them for similar threats in the future. But is this behaviour adaptive during a pandemic when bad news is ubiquitous? We examine the emotional consequences of exposure to brief snippets of COVID-related news via a Twitter feed (Study 1), or a YouTube reaction video (Study 2). Compared to a no-information exposure group, consumption of just 2-4 minutes of COVID-related news led to immediate and significant reductions in positive affect (Studies 1 and 2) and optimism (Study 2). Exposure to COVID-related kind acts did not have the same negative consequences, suggesting that not all social media exposure is detrimental for well-being. We discuss strategies to counteract the negative emotional consequences of exposure to negative news on social media.

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Brief exposure to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Doom-scrolling has negative emotional consequences, but kindness-scrolling does not.

The ventrolateral prefrontal cortices (VLPFC) are crucial regions involved in voluntary emotion regulation. However, the lateralization of the VLPFC in downregulating negative emotions remains unclear; and whether the causal role of the VLPFC is generalizable to upregulating positive emotions is unexplored. This study used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to examine the causal relationship between the left/right VLPFC and social emotion reappraisal. One hundred and twenty participants were randomly assigned to either active (left and right VLPFC groups, n = 40/40) or sham (vertex, n = 40) TMS groups. Participants were instructed to passively receive social feedback or use reappraisal strategies to positively regulate their emotions. While the subjective emotional rating showed that the bilateral VLPFC facilitated the reappraisal success, the electrophysiological measure of the late positive potential (LPP) demonstrated a more critical role of the right VLPFC on social pain relief (decreased LPP amplitudes) and social reward magnification (enhanced LPP amplitudes). In addition, the influence of emotion regulation on social evaluation was found to be mediated by the memory of social feedback, indicating the importance of memory in social behavioral shaping. These findings suggest clinical protocols for the rehabilitation of emotion‐regulatory function in patients with affective and social disorders.

The causal role of the bilateral ventrolateral prefrontal cortices on emotion regulation of social feedback

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic fundamentally disrupted humans’ social life and behavior. Public health measures may have inadvertently impacted how people care for each other. This study investigated prosocial behavior, its association well-being, and predictors of prosocial behavior during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and sought to understand whether region-specific differences exist. Participants (N = 9,496) from eight regions clustering multiple countries around the world responded to a cross-sectional online-survey investigating the psychological consequences of the first upsurge of lockdowns in spring 2020. Prosocial behavior was reported to occur frequently. Multiple regression analyses showed that prosocial behavior was associated with better well-being consistently across regions. With regard to predictors of prosocial behavior, high levels of perceived social support were most strongly associated with prosocial behavior, followed by high levels of perceived stress, positive affect and psychological flexibility. Sociodemographic and psychosocial predictors of prosocial behavior were similar across regions.

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To Help or Not to Help? Prosocial Behavior, Its Association With Well-Being, and Predictors of Prosocial Behavior During the Coronavirus Disease Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic poses significant threat to humans’ physical and mental wellbeing. In response, there has been an urgent “call to action” for psychological interventions that enhance positive emotion and psychological resilience. Extending upon past research documenting the wellbeing benefits of generous action, we conducted two online pre-registered experiments (N =1,623) during the pandemic in which participants were randomly assigned to engage in other- or self-beneficial action. Specifically, participants made charitable donations or gained money for themselves (Experiment 1); purchased COVID-19-related or COVID-19-unrelated items for someone else or for themselves (Experiment 2). Results showed that prosocial behavior led to greater positive affect, meaningfulness, empathy and social connectedness. Affect benefits were detectable whether prosocial spending was COVID-19-related or not. These findings provide support for one strategy to bolster wellbeing during the pandemic – generous action – which may also promote cooperation and social cohesiveness needed to contain and overcome the virus.

/pdf/prosocial-behavior-promotes-positive-emotion-during-the-5e6ylp11h7.pdf

Prosocial behavior promotes positive emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic

Insomnia has been shown to negatively affect one's cognitive functioning. While there has been some evidence suggesting sleep disruption in relation to impaired inhibitory control, a major component of executive function, little is known about the underlying neural processing in insomnia. The current study aimed to examine the differences in the behavioral responses and electroencephalography (EEG) correlates of inhibitory control between youths with insomnia and healthy sleepers. Twenty-eight participants with insomnia disorder and 31 healthy sleeper controls aged between 15 and 25 completed the study. Electroencephalographic activity was recorded during the Cued Go/NoGo (CGNG) task, a task assessing inhibitory control. Although insomnia group exhibited comparable behavioral performance to the healthy sleeper group, they showed impaired attention preparation, as displayed by a smaller contingent negative variation (CNV) component (F = 4.10, p = 0.048) after cue onset; and demonstrated impaired inhibitory control, as evidenced by smaller N2 and theta power on 200-350 ms (MANCOVA multivariate Group effect, F = 5.85, p < 0.001). The results suggested that youths with insomnia demonstrated altered brain activity during inhibitory control, despite their comparable behavioral performance. Given that impaired inhibitory control is often implicated in psychopathology, future studies with a longitudinal design are needed to further explore the long-term impacts and trajectory of altered inhibitory control in youths with insomnia.

Altered brain activity related to inhibitory processing in youth with insomnia.

When people are confronted with feedback that counters their prior beliefs, they preferentially rely on desirable rather than undesirable feedback in belief updating, i.e. an optimism bias. In two pre-registered EEG studies employing an adverse life event probability estimation task, we investigated the neurocognitive processes that support the formation and the change of optimism biases in immediate and 24 h delayed tests. We found that optimistic belief updating biases not only emerged immediately but also became significantly larger after 24 h, suggesting an active role of valence-dependent offline consolidation processes in the change of optimism biases. Participants also showed optimistic memory biases: they were less accurate in remembering undesirable than desirable feedback probabilities, with inferior memories of undesirable feedback associated with lower belief updating in the delayed test. Examining event-related brain potentials (ERPs) revealed that desirability of feedback biased initial encoding: desirable feedback elicited larger P300s than undesirable feedback, with larger P300 amplitudes predicting both higher belief updating and memory accuracies. These results suggest that desirability of feedback could bias both online and offline memory-related processes such as encoding and consolidation, with both processes contributing to the formation and change of optimism biases.

Optimistic amnesia: how online and offline processing shape belief updating and memory biases in immediate and long-term optimism biases.

Study objectives Sleep plays a pivotal role in the off-line processing of emotional memory. However, much remains unknown for its immediate vs. long-term influences. We employed behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate the short- and long-term impacts of sleep vs. sleep deprivation on emotional memory. Methods Fifty-nine participants incidentally learned 60 negative and 60 neutral pictures in the evening and were randomly assigned to either sleep or sleep deprivation conditions. We measured memory recognition and subjective affective ratings in 12- and 60-hour post-encoding tests, with EEGs in the delayed test. Results In a 12-hour post-encoding test, compared to sleep deprivation, sleep equally preserved both negative and neutral memory, and their affective tones. In the 60-hour post-encoding test, negative and neutral memories declined significantly in the sleep group, with attenuated emotional responses to negative memories over time. Furthermore, two groups showed spatial-temporally distinguishable ERPs at delayed test: while both groups showed the old-new frontal negativity (300-500 ms, FN400), sleep-deprived participants additionally showed an old-new parietal, Late Positive Component effect (600-1000 ms, LPC). ﻿Multivariate whole-brain ERPs analyses further suggested that sleep prioritized neural representation of emotion over memory processing, while they were less distinguishable in the sleep deprivation group. Conclusions These data suggested that sleep's impact on emotional memory and affective responses is time-dependent: sleep preserved memories and affective tones in the short term, while ameliorating affective tones in the long term. Univariate and multivariate EEG analyses revealed different neurocognitive processing of remote, emotional memories between sleep and sleep deprivation groups.

Sleep's short-term memory preservation and long-term affect depotentiation effect in emotional memory consolidation: behavioral and EEG evidence.

When reminded of an unpleasant experience, people often try to exclude the unwanted memory from awareness in an effort to forget it, a process known as retrieval suppression. Yet, how fast can individual memories be targeted and controlled, and the neural dynamics in modulating item-specific cortical traces, remain elusive. Here, using multivariate decoding analyses on time-domain and time-frequency-domain EEGs, we found that retrieval suppression of aversive memories was distinct from retrieval and passive viewing, when given a reminder. Specifically, early elevation of mid-frontal theta power during the first 500 ms distinguished retrieval suppression from passive viewing, suggesting that suppression recruited early active control processes. On an item-level, we could discern activities relating to individual memories during active retrieval - initially, based on perceptual responses to reminders (0-500 ms) and later, via the reinstatement and maintenance of the target aversive scenes (500-3000 ms). Critically, suppressing retrieval significantly weakened (during 420-600 ms) and eventually abolished these item-specific cortical patterns till cue disappeared (1200-3000 ms), suggesting the successful exclusion of the unwelcome memory from awareness. Suppression of item-specific cortical patterns, particularly during an early 300-680 ms time window, bore behavioral consequences in predicting subsequent episodic forgetting. These findings present a precise timeline on the suppression of specific unwelcome memories: upon perceiving an unwelcome reminder, people rapidly deploy inhibitory control to truncate retrieval within 500 ms, which likely terminate the reminder-to-memory conversion at around 500 ms that would ordinarily arise through hippocampal pattern completion. We concluded that both rapid and sustained control are critical in abolishing cortical patterns of individual memories, limiting unwelcome awareness, and precipitating later forgetting.

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Xuanyi Lin

Papers

Prosocial behavior promotes positive emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic

Altered brain activity related to inhibitory processing in youth with insomnia.

Optimistic amnesia: how online and offline processing shape belief updating and memory biases in immediate and long-term optimism biases.

Sleep's short-term memory preservation and long-term affect depotentiation effect in emotional memory consolidation: behavioral and EEG evidence.

Neural dynamics of retrieval suppression in abolishing item-specific cortical pattern of unwanted emotional memories