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

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.

Increase in Linguistic Complexity in Older Adults During COVID-19.

The reported psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures included a decline in cognitive functioning in older adults. Cognitive functioning is known to correlate with the lexical and syntactic complexity of an individual's linguistic productions. We examined written narratives from the CoSoWELL corpus (v 1.0), collected from over 1,000 U.S. and Canadian older adults (55+ y.o.) before and during the first year of the pandemic. We expected a decrease in the linguistic complexity of the narratives, given the oft-reported reduction in cognitive functioning associated with COVID-19. Contrary to this expectation, all measures of linguistic complexity showed a steady increase from the pre-pandemic level throughout the first year of the global lockdown. We discuss possible reasons for this boost in light of exiting theories of cognition and offer a speculative link between the finding and reports of increased creativity during the pandemic.

Valence norms for 3,600 English words collected during the COVID-19 pandemic: Effects of age and the pandemic.

The topic of affective development over the lifespan is at the forefront of psychological science. One of the intriguing findings in this area is superior emotion regulation and increased positivity in older rather than younger adults. This paper aims to contribute to the empirical base of studies on the role of affect in cognition. We report a new dataset of valence (positivity) ratings to 3,600 English words collected from North American and British English-speaking younger (below 65 years of age) and older adults (65 years of age and older) during the COVID-19 pandemic. This dataset represents a broad range of valence and a rich selection of semantic categories. Our analyses of the new data pitted against comparable pre-pandemic (2013) data from younger counterparts reveal differences in the overall distribution of valence related both to age and the psychological fallout of the pandemic. Thus, we found at the group level that older participants produced higher valence ratings overall than their younger counterparts before and especially during the pandemic. Moreover, valence ratings saw a super-linear increase after the age of 65. Together, these findings provide new evidence for emotion regulation throughout adulthood, including a novel demonstration of greater emotional resilience in older adults to the stressors of the pandemic.

Cognitive and social well-being in older adulthood: The CoSoWELL corpus of written life stories.

This paper presents the Cognitive and Social WELL-being (CoSoWELL) project that consists of two components. One is a large corpus of narratives written by over 1000 North American older adults (55+ years old) in five test sessions before and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other component is a rich collection of socio-demographic data collected through a survey from the same participants. This paper introduces the first release of the corpus consisting of 1.3 million tokens and the survey data (CoSoWELL version 1.0). It also presents a series of analyses validating design decisions for creating the corpus of narratives written about personal life events that took place in the distant past, recent past (yesterday) and future, along with control narratives. We report results of computational topic modeling and linguistic analyses of the narratives in the corpus, which track the time-locked impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the content of autobiographical memories before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main findings demonstrate a high validity of our analytical approach to unique narrative data and point to both the locus of topical shifts (narratives about recent past and future) and their detailed timeline. We make the CoSoWELL corpus and survey data available to researchers and discuss implications of our findings in the framework of research on aging and autobiographical memories under stress.