We hypothesized that resilience would buffer people from depression caused by loneliness andsocial isolation during the COVID pandemic. Capitalizing on a unique longitudinal dataset of 447American adults, we used well established self-report instruments to find that resilience at time 1 buffered individuals against the effects of loneliness at time 2 causing depression at time 3. Effects were robust across age, sex, and education level, and generalized to trait variables we believe are partly constitutive of resilience: conscientiousness, extraversion, and (negatively) neuroticism. However, our results were relatively specific to depression as the outcome, and did not generalize to other adverse outcomes, such as stress and anxiety. Future studies can use the open dataset provided together with the new resilience factors that we propose in order to further test the interventional potential of our findings.
Trait resilience protects against depression caused by loneliness during the COVID pandemic (preprint)/ en