Health Psychology, Vol 43(10), Oct 2024, 705-717; doi:10.1037/hea0001394
Objective: Cognitive strategies like finding benefits during adversity may facilitate coping during collective stressors (like COVID-19) by reducing distress or motivating health protective behaviors. Method: We explored relationships between benefit finding, collective- and individual-level adversity exposure, psychological distress, and health protective behaviors using longitudinal data collected during the COVID-19 era from a representative, probability-based sample of U.S. residents: Wave 1 (N = 6,514, March 18, 2020–April 18, 2020, 58.5% completion rate); Wave 2 (N = 5,661, September 26, 2020–October 16, 2020, 87.1% completion rate); Wave 3 (N = 4,881, November 8, 2021–November 24, 2021, 75.3% completion rate); and Wave 4 (N = 4,859, May 19, 2022–June 16, 2022, 75.1% completion rate). Results: Benefit finding was common; k-means clustering (an exploratory, data-driven approach) yielded five trajectories: always high (15.85%), always low (18.52%), always middle (28.47%), increasing (17.79%), and decreasing (19.37%). Benefit-finding trajectories were generally not strong correlates of psychological distress and functional impairment over time. Rather, benefit finding robustly correlated with health protective behaviors relevant to COVID-19 and the seasonal flu. In covariate-adjusted models, benefit finding positively correlated with more social distancing (β = .24, p p OR = 1.23, p = .001) and flu (OR = 1.29, p