  The introduction of COVID-19 lockdown measures and an outlook on return to
normality are demanding societal changes. Among the most pressing questions is
how individuals adjust to the pandemic. This paper examines the emotional
responses to the pandemic in a repeated-measures design. Data (n=1698) were
collected in April 2020 (during strict lockdown measures) and in April 2021
(when vaccination programmes gained traction). We asked participants to report
their emotions and express these in text data. Statistical tests revealed an
average trend towards better adjustment to the pandemic. However, clustering
analyses suggested a more complex heterogeneous pattern with a well-coping and
a resigning subgroup of participants. Linguistic computational analyses
uncovered that topics and n-gram frequencies shifted towards attention to the
vaccination programme and away from general worrying. Implications for public
mental health efforts in identifying people at heightened risk are discussed.
The dataset is made publicly available.
