In early pandemic waves, when vaccination against COVID-19 was not yet an option, distancing and reduced social contact were the most effective measures to slow down the pandemic. Changes in frequency and forms of social contact have reduced the spread of the COVID-19 virus and thus saved lives, yet there is increasing evidence for negative side effects such as mental health issues. In the present study, we investigate the development of loneliness and its predictors to examine the role of changes in social networks due to social distancing and other COVID-19-related life changes. A total of 737 participants (age range = 18–81 years) completed an online survey in three waves during the last quarter of 2020 at one-month intervals. Latent growth and multilevel modeling revealed that emotional loneliness increased over time, while social loneliness remained stable. Moreover, socially lonely individuals were likely to also develop emotional loneliness over time. Increased social distancing and sanitary measures were accompanied by decreased social interactions and loss of individuals considered SOS contacts and confidants. Changes in specific social network indicators were differentially associated with changes in emotional vs social loneliness: Loss of friends considered confidants was associated with increasing emotional loneliness, whereas loss of friends considered SOS contacts and reduced overall social interactions were related to increasing social loneliness. Lastly, individuals with more family-and-friend SOS contacts, more friends as confidants and an overall higher number of social interactions were more protected from feeling socially or emotionally lonely. Study findings enhance the understanding of underlying mechanisms differentially contributing to social and emotional loneliness and offer practical suggestions to reduce mental-health side effects of social distancing.

Different theoretical frameworks have been developed to account for the impact of social connectedness on individual outcomes such as vulnerability and subjective well-being, in particular approaches based on social identity theory, on social networks, and on social capital. We review research that describes how such social connectedness approaches rooted in psychological, social-psychological and sociological traditions demonstrate the link between social relations, vulnerability and well-being.We summarize and compare key arguments of these approaches in terms of their views on the processes relating the collective-relational to the individual-psychological. Indeed, social connectedness is generally associated with positive individual outcomes (such as prevention of physical and mental health issues and improved subjective well-being).Under some circumstances, however, these positive effects weaken or disappear. We therefore discuss boundary conditions of these processes, by looking at research explaining variation of the relation between connectedness and well-being as a function of social conditions (e.g., structural inequality, weak social relations, or negative social identities).Last, we discuss specificities and commonalities between approaches, for example regarding bridging and bonding social capital, or intergroup and intragroup relations. We highlight the tensions between approaches and offer some guidelines regarding their most promising use as a function of one’s research goals.

Objectives: Asian Americans are often perceived as perpetual foreigners even when they are born and raised in the country. Such national exclusion is particularly evident when considering implicit biases that reveal American is more strongly associated with White than Asian identity. In the current research, we examined if living in a region where people implicitly associate American nationality more strongly with White over Asian identity predicts the political participation of Asian Americans living within the same region. Method: Data from 36,838 participants through Project Implicit between 2004 and 2008 provided contextlevel information on implicit and explicit national exclusion (i.e., American = White belief), while data from 3,748 Asian Americans through the 2008 National Asian American Survey provided an index of political participation. Results: Using data from 61 U.S. counties, multilevel modeling revealed that in counties with higher levels of implicit national exclusion of Asian Americans, Asian Americans reported higher (not lower) political participation. This effect emerged even after controlling for several additional county-level variables. Similar analyses using an explicit measure of context-level national exclusion yielded convergent findings. Conclusions: Asian Americans reported greater political participation in counties with higher aggregate-levels of implicit and explicit American = White associations. Possible mechanisms accounting for the unexpected and counterintuitive relation between the national exclusion of Asian Americans and political participation among Asian Americans are discussed.

Coping strategies help individuals face stressful events and adapt to them. During the second wave of the COVID19 pandemic, individuals were confronted with increased governmental restrictions that aimed in impeding the propagation of the virus, but affected, at the same time, the life as we knew it, with negative consequences for mental health. This study aims at identifying the coping strategies that individuals used during this period, whether they changed over time and how they affected depressive symptoms in a life span sample in Switzerland. Our sample consisted of 736 individuals with age ranging between 18 and 81 years. The study was conducted in three waves with one-month intervals during the second pandemic-wave (i.e., October, November, December 2020). We used multilevel modelling to identify within-subject change and between-subject differences in depressive symptoms, with coping strategies and sociodemographic variables included as predictors. Older age, male gender, cohabiting with others, and being employed protected from feeling depressed. Results also indicated that seeking functional support, seeking emotional support, positive reappraisal and acceptance decreased, while self-distraction and depressive symptoms increased. When positive reappraisal decreased or/and when self-distraction increased, depressive symptoms also increased. This protective effect of positive reappraisal on depression differed in magnitude for younger and older individuals: Reduction in positive reappraisal was more strongly related to increases in depression for younger individuals. In sum, to adapt to the pandemic stress individuals changed the frequency of coping strategy use, but only changes in positive reappraisal and in self-distracting had an influence on depressive symptoms.