Table 1.

Psychosocial resilience factors during the COVID-19 pandemic^a

Factor	Description	Refs
Perceptions of external resources
Perceived social support	Network of social resources perceived by an individual	[9,10]
Cognitive and behavioral coping
Coping strategies (e.g., problem-focused coping)	Cognitive and behavioral efforts serving to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing personal resources	[2,11,12]
Cognitive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., positive reappraisal)	Conscious thoughts through which individuals aim to regulate their emotions in response to stressors; can be considered a subcategory of coping strategies	[13,14]
Regulatory flexibility	Individual’s ability to modulate emotional experiences and to use different coping strategies meeting contextual demands and depending on feedback. Related (and partly overlapping) concepts are coping flexibility, adaptive flexibility, and psychological flexibility	[15,16]
Positive outcome and future expectancies
(Dispositional) optimism	Extent to which individuals hold generalized favorable expectancies for the future	[17]
Hope	Expectation that one will have positive experiences or that potential negative situations will not materialize	[17]
Perceptions of general and situational control
Locus of control	Degree to which individuals believe to have control over outcomes in their lives, with a strong internal locus of control reflecting the belief that outcomes primarily result from their own action	[18,19]
Self-efficacy	Individual’s perception of the capability to perform behaviors necessary to produce specific performance	[17,20,21]
Meaning, coherence and spirituality
Meaning in life	Describes one’s perception of purpose, coherence, and significance in life	[22,23]
Sense of coherence	Describes degree to which individuals perceive their lives as comprehensible and manageable, and believe that life challenges represent a source of meaning	[24,25]
Spirituality	Describes a general phenomenon in which one seeks closeness and/or connectedness between oneself and a higher power or purpose	[26]

^aThis selection of resilience factors builds on two systematic reviews [7,8] and is limited to psychosocial factors investigated during the pandemic. Another concept referred to as resilience factor is self-reported resilience (i.e., dispositional resilience and self-rated ability to recover from stress). From our point of view, the latter is rather a proxy measure of resilient outcomes [27]. Although pre-stressor mental distress, personality traits, sex/gender, and age have been identified as modifying factors of pandemic-related mental distress [28., 29., 30.], they were not in the scope of this review focusing on psychosocial resilience factors.