Emotional regulation and coping strategies predicted trajectories of anxiety across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health have been well-documented, but only a few studies have characterized distinct trajectories of anxiety over time. Further, whether specific emotion regulation and coping efforts to manage pandemic distress predict these distinct trajectories remains unexamined.

Aims: The study characterized anxiety trajectories across the first year of the pandemic and identified emotion regulation and coping strategies that predict these classes of anxiety trajectories. A national sample of 1108 U.S. adults completed online surveys six times in the first year of the pandemic. Five emotion regulation and coping strategies were assessed (substance use, active, behavioral disengagement, positive reappraisal, and catastrophizing). Latent Growth Mixture Modeling (LGGM) analyses were performed to identify anxiety trajectory classes.

Results: LGMM revealed five latent classes: Resilience (consistently very low anxiety; 79.9%), Moderate Anxiety (8.8%), Chronic High Anxiety (4.6%), Improving-Worsening Anxiety (3.2%), and Worsening-Improving Anxiety (3.5%). Using substances, disengagement, and catastrophizing to deal with COVID-19 stress consistently predicted trajectories higher in anxiety as did active coping, while positive reappraisal was unrelated to trajectory class membership.

Conclusions: These results identify emotion regulation and coping strategies that appeared to exacerbate anxiety during the course of the pandemic.