The COVID-19 pandemic presents a significant challenge to wellbeing for people around the world. Here, we examine which individual and societal factors can predict the extent to which individuals suffer or thrive during the COVID-19 outbreak, with survey data collected from 26,684 participants in 51 countries from 17 April to 15 May 2020. We show that wellbeing is linked to an individual's recent experiences of specific momentary positive and negative emotions, including love, calm, determination, and loneliness. Higher socioeconomic status was associated with better wellbeing. The present study provides a rich map of emotional experiences and wellbeing around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak, and points to calm, connection, and control as central to our wellbeing at this time of collective crisis.

Assessing evolution of cognitive structures across historical periods has remained challenging in the absence of direct access to humans from the past. Overcoming some of these challenges, we examined shifts in the implicit cognitive structures in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the earliest surviving pieces of literature, circulating in various versions over a period of approx. 2000 years in ancient Mesopotamia. Using a canonical English translation, we applied natural language processing (NLP) and human coding to extract low-dimensional representations of the implicit personality structure in three different historical epochs. We found systematic shifts over time with increasing complexity and increasing resemblance of contemporary personality models in later periods. We discuss how lexical analyses of ancient texts using trait co-occurrence analyses can provide novel insights on the evolution of human behaviour of relevance for contemporary social and behavioural science and the study of ancient societies.