67 individual transilience in the face of the covid-19 pandemic 3.1. INTRODUCTION In March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared the rapid spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), a deadly viral infection caused by a severe acute respiratory syndrome (i.e., SARS-Cov_2), as a global pandemic. The virus posed a severe threat to people’s health. In many countries across the world, unprecedented containment measures (i.e., working remotely, national lockdowns, curfews, quarantine) were imposed to limit the spread of the virus and to avoid overloading healthcare systems. People needed to adapt to the novel situation by engaging in a series of new behaviours, such as keeping 1.5m distance, avoiding contact with others, working from home and sanitising hands regularly. Furthermore, the disruption caused by the pandemic and the consequences of the lockdowns (e.g., home schooling, working from home, unemployment, isolation) threatened people’s well-being (Bridgland et al., 2021; O’Connor et al., 2020; Restubog et al., 2020; Zacher & Rudolph, 2021). Considering that pandemics are expected to keep happening in the future (Kretzschmar et al., 2022), it is crucial to understand which factors motivated people to take action to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and helped them to maintain well-being. In this paper we investigate whether transilience, a novel construct that explains adaptation in the context of climate change (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023a; 2023b), is relevant also for understanding adaptation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Transilience reflects the perceived capacity to persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of an adversity. Studies have shown that people perceive transilience in the face of climate change, and that the more strongly they do so, the more likely they are to engage in different types of climate change adaptation behaviours, and the higher their general well-being (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023a; 2023b). Notably, the risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic were significantly more acute and directly threatening for individuals’ lives compared to risks associated with climate change, especially during the initial stages of the pandemic. This raises the question whether transilience is also a relevant construct for understanding adaptation to acute and directly threatening adversities, like the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to investigate, first, whether people perceived transilience in the face of COVID-19. Next, we aimed to study whether higher transilience is positively associated with a wide range of adaptive responses in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as with mental health, despite contextual and situational differences in the acuteness of the threat posed by COVID-19 and in the national policies implemented to limit the spread of the virus. Studying the relevance of transilience in the face of this different adversity, and across different contexts and times in which the seriousness of the threat varies, will provide insight into the extent to which transilience is generalizable and relevant to understand human adaptation to (various) adversities. 3
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