Original studyPsych, 2026Read the paper →
When the coronavirus pandemic swept across Europe in 2020, millions of people faced the same frightening news, yet they coped in very different ways. Some kept their spirits up through months of uncertainty, while others felt their mood sink. A new German study suggests that a person’s underlying resilience, and their deeper beliefs about who controls their life, mattered more than the moment to moment tricks they used to manage their feelings.
Researchers at the University of Koblenz followed 716 German adults who were recruited by a polling company to reflect the wider population. The study, published in the journal Psych, measured how threatened people felt by the pandemic in June 2020, along with their emotion regulation habits, resilience, and locus of control. Their emotional well-being was then measured again in November 2020, as the second wave took hold.
Locus of control describes how much people believe events in their lives depend on their own actions, which psychologists call internal control, or on luck, fate, and powerful others, known as external control. The team wanted to know whether these beliefs behave like a fixed personality trait or shift as a state in response to a crisis.
The results pointed towards a stable trait. Control beliefs did not carry the effect of pandemic threat through to later mood, as a shifting state would be expected to do. Instead, they had a direct link with well-being, and people who leaned towards external control reported poorer emotional well-being months later.
Resilience emerged as the strongest protective factor. People with greater resilience reported more positive feelings and fewer negative ones in November, and resilience was the only factor that carried the effect of pandemic threat through to later mood. Emotion regulation strategies, such as rethinking a situation or bottling up feelings, did not play that role.
External control beliefs also changed how people responded to the threat. Among those who felt their lives were largely in the hands of others, perceived threat was more closely tied to resilience and to the use of reappraisal and suppression. In other words, emotional coping skills appeared to matter most for people who felt they had little personal control.
The authors are careful about the limits of their design. Locus of control was measured only once, at the start, so the study could not track whether control beliefs rose and fell over time. They say this choice naturally favours a trait explanation, and that diary studies with repeated measurements would be needed to test the idea properly.
Even so, the findings carry practical lessons for public health during future pandemics and other collective crises. Training that builds resilience, strengthens self-regulation skills, and helps people feel more in charge of their own lives could help protect mental health when the next large-scale threat arrives.
