Can Self-Concept Clarity Protect against A Pandemic? A Daily Study on Self-Concept Clarity and Negative Affect during the COVID-19 Outbreak

Determinants of workers’ well-being during the COVID-19 outbreak: An exploratory study

“…The COVID-19 outbreak is an unprecedented event in recent times, with a tremendous negative threat to inviduals' adjustment (e.g., Alessandri et al, 2021;Bellotti et al, 2021;Canet-Juric et al, 2020), public health as well as to the economic system. For example, in the United States alone, the estimated economic damage to the labour market caused by the crisis is greater than that of the Great Recession or the 2008 crisis (Coibion et al, 2020).…”

Satisfaction with life during the COVID-19 pandemic: the role of affect balance and self-concept clarity

“…Lastly, as the participants in this study were majority young adults with the mean age of 23 years old, this might affect the generalizability of the studies' findings as past studies indicated that different age groups might react or interpret stressful events caused by the pandemic in various ways in accordance with their level of self-concept clarity [18]. Given this, future researchers are encouraged to include participants of different age groups while conducting a similar study, to gain more comprehensive findings that are generalizable to people of all age groups.…”

“…Specifically, past studies indicated that self-concept clarity plays a crucial role in regulating one's emotions and behaviors [18]. This is because high levels of self-concept clarity provide individuals with a stable set of values or beliefs that they can count on to make better decisions and seek further validations, thus allowing them to be more resilient and emotionally stable when facing stressful life events [19], [20].…”

“…Moreover, a low level of self-concept clarity was also found to be strongly associated with common factors of negative emotional experience, such as neuroticism [40], ruminative behaviors [41], anxiety [42], and perceived stress [43]. According to a recent study done by Alessandri and colleagues [18], participants who have a higher level of self-concept clarity were found to have a lower level of negative affect during the COVID-19 pandemic as compared to participants with lower self-concept clarity, due to their good emotional regulation skills. Hence, per the above findings, it is safe to assume that affect balance might play a role in explaining the mechanisms between the relationship of selfconcept clarity and life satisfaction.…”

Identity 20-Year Anniversary: Time to Celebrate and Start a New Journey

“…The current issue of Identity offers an excellent showcase of the diversity (in theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and populations) that we hope to continue seeing in the journal. This issue, in fact, comprises a three-wave longitudinal study tackling relationships between demographic factors and trajectories of identity distress in various life domains in young adults in Japan (Hihara et al, 2021); a daily study addressing how self-concept clarity may be implicated in the stress process related to the COVID-19 outbreak in young adults from Italy (Alessandri et al, 2021); a longitudinal and cross-national study on national and European identity formation in adolescents and young adults from Germany and Czech Republic (Jugert et al, 2021); a cross-sectional study examining how social identification plays a key role in explaining collective climate activism in current or potential activists of an environmental movement from UK (Furlong & Vignoles, 2021); a qualitative study investigating ethnic-racial identity exploration in real-time unguided conversations between friend pairs of emerging adults from different ethnic groups in the US (Moffitt & Syed, 2021). Overall, this set of studies provides a great example of the richness and diversity of identity research conducted around the globe, with the common intent of enhancing our understanding of how individuals develop their own identity, tackling how this process is strongly embedded in the social context, and its core implications for individuals' adjustment and capacity of acting in their social reality.…”