By James F. Smith, Harvard Kennedy School, August 2, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic increased negative emotions across the world. People reported poor mental health and behavior problems including sleeping less, consuming more drugs and alcohol, struggling to concentrate, and fighting more with loved ones.
Over the past year, researchers from scores of countries joined together to study whether interventions to mitigate negative emotions and increase positive emotions could improve psychological resilience and help people respond better to adversity.
Their findings, released Monday in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour show that using a simple method to help people think differently about their situations improved their emotional response. That emotion regulation strategy, known as reappraisal, “consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions” among the study’s participants. “Importantly, the effects of the intervention were not meager,” helping ease the emotional toll caused by lockdown and self-isolation.
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[Please click here to read the original study article in Nature: Human Behavior.]
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