The voices of youths in COVID-19 times: exploring young people's emotional representations

Since the spread of the COVID-19 virus worldwide, the pandemic had psychological consequences for the entire population for various reasons including restrictions, isolation, and socioeconomic changes. Young people were particularly affected by these psychological consequences, which formed the focus of the mental health concerns voiced by the World Health Organization. This research aimed to analyze, first-hand, the primary emotions that COVID-19 evoked in young Spanish people after two years of the pandemic. Participants were recruited through a snowball sampling procedure using emails, virtual platforms of the schools, and social networks, and a google forms questionnaire was administered for data collection. A total of 479 Spanish young people (18-36 years) participated in this study. The questionnaire consisted of a free-association exercise based on the Grid Elaboration Method (GEM) to analyze the participants' emotional representations of COVID-19. In addition, lexical analysis was used to analyze the text corpus. As a result, it could be observed that sadness was the core emotion experienced among young people, followed by fear. Specifically, emotional breakdown, fear, fatigue, and anger figured centrally in their emotional representations. Moreover, the findings revealed new patterns of self- and onward blaming towards youths. It was concluded that results of this research provide important clues for managing the mental health of young people, particularly during future pandemics.