Emotional balance, health, and resilience at the start of COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Self-organizing systems can shift between stability and flexibility in response to perturbation, a potential adaptive mechanism for understanding biopsychosocial resilience. Inverse power law (IPL) structure, a frequency distribution that describes fractal patterns commonly produced by self-organization, produces measurements of stability and flexibility. This study applies these measures to emotional resilience at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ratings of frequency over the past week (1-5 Likert scale) across 12 emotions (six positive and six negative) were gathered in mid-April 2020 as part of a survey of adults' (N = 4,094) pandemic experiences and health in the United States. The distributions of everyone's emotion ratings were tested for IPL fit, resulting in a mean R² = .75. A steeper IPL shape parameter, reflecting greater emotional stability, was associated with better mental (anxiety, depression, and stress) and physical (fatigue, headache, and diarrhea) health overall. However, when total scores for positive and negative emotion were controlled, the reverse effect was found. Finally, a significant interaction effect was found between a measure of COVID-19 impact and IPL shape on each of the six health outcomes, suggesting that greater emotional flexibility may provide buffering against large-scale and unexpected challenges. Altogether, these results suggest that emotional stability may be most beneficial against illness when life is relatively stable, while emotional flexibility may be more adaptive when life is unstable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).