Objectives: COVID-19 escalated stress within family/neighborhood (local) and national/cultural (global) levels. However, the impact of socioecological levels of stress on pandemic emotion regulation remains largely unexplored.
Methods: Thirty older adults from the Northeast US (63-92 years) reported on pandemic stress and emotion regulation in semi-structured interviews. Responses were coded into socioecological sources of local and global stress, and associated use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies from the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire was explored.
Results: Older adults experienced significant distress at global levels, and perception of lacking top-down safety governance may have exacerbated local distress of engaging in daily activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants endorsed coping with local stressors via perspective-taking, acceptance, and other adaptive strategies, while global sources of stress were associated with greater use of maladaptive strategies, including other-blame and rumination.
Conclusion: Quantitative assessments may underestimate significant older adult distress and maladaptive coping toward global stressors. Findings should be replicated with more diverse populations beyond the COVID-19 context.
Keywords: coping; distress; resilience.