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Present-day college students are particularly impacted by the disconcerting effects of Covid-19 because of their vulnerability towards mental health struggles. The current study identified coping strategies used by students in the United States and how those strategies are associated with trauma-related distress. Results showed acceptance, emotional processing, and social support were the most commonly used coping strategies. Furthermore, avoidance coping related to higher distress than more helpful approaches (e.g., humor). Demographic findings revealed that Black students used more religious coping than did White and Asian students. Additionally, older and upper-year students used substances to cope more than did other students, including those with higher grade point averages. Our discussion focuses on how the findings of the present study can be used to enhance student support, resiliency, academic performance, and retention.

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Introduction: Expressive writing (EW) research has shown this intervention's differential efficacy for various stressors, but the underlying mechanisms are rarely examined. These mechanisms might differ for interpersonal and impersonal stressors and for high-and low closure events. This study explored process (meaning making, coherence) and content (interpersonal decentering) characteristics of EW narratives as possible mechanisms. Method: One hundred seventy-six undergraduates (ages 18-39) wrote EW narratives that were content analyzed to classify the negative event as interpersonal or impersonal. Meaning making, coherence, and interpersonal decentering were scored reliably from those same narratives by different teams of trained expert scorers who were unaware of the hypotheses and the other codings. Results: Women wrote about interpersonal events more than did men. Decentering and meaning making were positively correlated, and both negatively correlated with narrative coherence, for low closure events only. Women writing about low closure interpersonal events activated more meaning making and more mature interpersonal decentering than did other women and men. Conclusion: Our findings provide insight into narrative processes that may contribute to the benefits from EW tasks. Perhaps early adults, especially women, spontaneously activate meaning-making and decentering processes to attain closure for stressful interpersonal events. Encouraging activated cognitive processing in psychotherapy might assist recovery.