The paper “Disentangling Emotions during the Coronavirus Outbreak in Spain: Inner Emotions, Descriptive Feeling Rules and Socioemotional Conventions” by Amparo Caballero, Sergio Villar, Itziar Fernández, Verónica Sevillano, Pablo Gavilán, and Pilar Carrera published in The Spanish Journal of Psychology has been chosen as the Editor’s Choice Article for August 2022.

“What are people feeling during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are they scared? Perhaps angry? Or are they feeling just fine? What are we even supposed to feel during these times?” These questions comprised the starting point of the two studies that form our recently published article, “Disentangling Emotions during the Coronavirus Outbreak in Spain: Inner Emotions, Descripting Feeling Rules and Socioemotional Conventions” published in The Spanish Journal of Psychology.

COVID-19 has been one of the most challenging events that humanity has faced in recent decades. No one was prepared to deal with such an unexpected, global, and threatening event. Not only did the disease itself destabilize our day-to-day routine but also all the security measures, such as the imposition of wearing facial masks, keeping social distance and living under lockdown, were completely new scenarios for most of us. Handling all this novelty was difficult from many different perspectives; however, we wanted to focus our attention on emotions.

When we committed to exploring this topic, we had a very clear goal in mind; i.e., we did not want to settle for self-reports about one’s emotions but instead aimed to capture a wider emotional phenomenon. For constructionism, language is the link among different levels of analysis of emotional events, from intrapersonal to interpersonal and macrosocial. The interaction among these emotional levels allows us to construe an emotional episode and label it with an emotion word, coordinate with the emotions perceived in others, and represent events as a society. Therefore, we considered emotions in the frame of the COVID-19 pandemic, distinguishing among the three different perspectives contained in the title of the article, i.e., what individuals were feeling (inner emotions, personal level), what individuals thought others were feeling (descriptive feeling rules, interpersonal level), and what emotions were being shared on the internet as an indicator of the emotional meaning of COVID-19 in society (socioemotional conventions, macrosocial level). These three points of view provided us with a better picture of what COVID-19 meant to Spanish society, emotionally speaking.

The results clarified and supported the complexity of emotional concepts and the importance of exploring these concepts at different levels of analysis. There was a similarity between the emotional meaning of COVID-19 in society and the descriptive feeling rules, whereas the reported inner emotions were clearly distinct; at the personal level, we found that the most predominant emotion was ”hope”. However, at the interpersonal and macrosocial levels, “fear” was the predominant emotion in almost every phase of the pandemic. In general, positive emotions were more informed when participants had to express how they were feeling, while negative emotions were more informed when participants had to indicate how others were feeling; these negative emotions were also more associated with the COVID-19 pandemic on the internet.

As a conclusion for these studies and as we state at the end of the article, professionals who are interested in emotions need to know the links among the different emotional levels in order to work effectively with emotional phenomena. For example, they should consider that socially shared emotions do not necessarily translate into personal experiences, which is a relevant point when designing mass media messages. Emotions that are felt and communicated could be better understood considering their differences regarding socioemotional conventions. Thus, people might assume that their feelings are different from those imposed by social norms; however, those emotions are not unhealthy or inconvenient.

It is quite common these days to hear that it is okay not to be okay; however, it is also okay to be okay, even if the rest of the world seems to be falling apart.