While many adversities affect limited groups of people, the COVID-19 pandemic brought a range of stressors to entire populations. Using a person-centered approach, this study analyzed the most frequent combinations of coping strategies used by general population during the first wave of the pandemic in a sample of 1,347 Slovenian adults. Latent profile analysis identified three coping profiles similar to those found in previous studies in specific samples and stressful circumstances: the engaged profile (active coping, planning, acceptance, positive reframing), the disengaged profile (low problem-focused coping, social support, acceptance, positive reframing), and the avoidant profile (substance use, self-blame, humor). Individuals with the engaged profile reported the highest levels of well-being and the lowest levels of ill-being. While individuals with the avoidant profile had the highest levels of anxiety and stress, those with the disengaged profile had the lowest levels of well-being, specifically engagement and positive relationships. The results imply the need to distinguish between the two less adaptive coping profiles, as one is characterized by the active use of dysfunctional strategies, and the other by the low use of all strategies, suggesting that psychological interventions should be tailored to these specificities.

The objective of the study was to elucidate the underlying mechanism through which basic personality dimensions predict indicators of psychological functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic, including subjective well-being and perceived stress. As a personality characteristic highly contextualized in stressful circumstances, resilience was expected to have a mediating role in this relationship. Method: A sample of 2,722 Slovene adults, aged from 18 to 82 years filled in the Big Five Inventory, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the Perceived Stress Scale, and the Mental Health Continuum. A path analysis with the Boot-strap estimation procedure was performed to evaluate the mediating effect of resilience in the relationship between personality and psychological functioning. Results: Resilience fully or partially mediated the relationships between all the Big Five but extraversion with subjective well-being and stress experienced at the beginning of the COVID-19 outburst. Neuroticism was the strongest predictor of less adaptive psychological functioning both directly and through diminished resilience. Conclusions: Resilience may be a major protective factor required for anadaptive response of an individual in stressful situations such as pandemic and the associated lockdown.

This study examined the effect of COVID-19 lockdown and infection concerns on positive and negative aspects of psychological functioning during the first weeks of the new coronavirus pandemic, and the mediating role of basic psychological needs satisfaction and frustration. Slovene adults (N = 425; 79% female) filled in questionnaires measuring COVID-19-related stressors, satisfaction and frustration of basic psychological needs, well-being, and ill-being. Results of the path analysis with Bootstrap estimation procedure revealed that the perceived severity of the COVID-19 lockdown circumstances predicted diminished psychological functioning of participants both directly and via decreased needs satisfaction and increased needs frustration. Conversely, the infection concerns had a much weaker and direct only effect on the increased ill-being, but no effect on well-being. These findings indicate that lockdown circumstances, but not the possibility of COVID-19 infection, predominantly shape individuals' ability to satisfy their basic needs and subsequently their psychological functioning during the pandemic. The study suggests that public health responses sould address not only risk of infection but also people's psychological needs.

Existing procedures for testing measurement invariance focus mainly on group-level comparisons rather than individual comparisons (i.e., the main conclusion typically concerns the question of comparability of group means). We propose a set of intuitive graphical displays called Person-Level Assessment of Measurement Invariance (PLAMI), which attempt to provide information about the effect of the lack of measurement invariance on the level of person scores. This information complements the group-level information contained in model fit indices and overall effect size indices, and should be especially useful for practitioners using tests for individual diagnostics. PLAMI uses results from the multiple-group factor analysis to estimate and visualize score distortions in terms of expected score difference between members of different groups and the probability of an unacceptably high score difference, conditional for the value of latent trait. The stability of the results can be evaluated by means of resampling. Simulation can be used for an a priori evaluation of the sample size adequacy. We illustrate the proposed plots on two real examples involving testing measurement invariance of the Machiavellianism scale, and we demonstrate the added value of PLAMI compared to the use of fit indices alone.

Background/Objective: This study examined the role of different psychological coping mechanisms in mental and physical health during the initial phases of the COVID-19 crisis with an emphasis on meaning-centered coping. Method: A total of 11,227 people from 30 countries across all continents participated in the study and completed measures of psychological distress (depression, stress, and anxiety), loneliness, well-being, and physical health, together with measures of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, and a measure called the Meaning-centered Coping Scale (MCCS) that was developed in the present study. Validation analyses of the MCCS were performed in all countries, and data were assessed by multilevel modeling (MLM). Results: The MCCS showed a robust one-factor structure in 30 countries with good test-retest, concurrent and divergent validity results. MLM analyses showed mixed results regarding emotion and problem-focused coping strategies. However, the MCCS was the strongest positive predictor of physical and mental health among all coping strategies, independently of demographic characteristics and country-level variables. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the MCCS is a valid measure to assess meaning-centered coping. The results also call for policies promoting effective coping to mitigate collective suffering during the pandemic.