The COVID-19 pandemic has defined the college career for this generation of learners, threatening mental health, identity development, and college functioning. We began tracking the impacts of this pandemic for 633 first-year college students from four U.S. universities (Mage = 18.8 years) in Spring 2020 and followed students to Spring 2023. Students provided narratives about the impacts of COVID-19 and reports of mental health concerns, identity development, well-being. Students reported concerns for mental health, identity, and well-being during the first year of COVID-19 impacts. The return to in-person activities predicted broad increases in narrative growth and concomitant decreases in COVID-19 stressors, increases in identity exploration and commitment, and increases in psychological and academic well-being. Changes in COVID-19 stressors and narrative growth served as mediators between the return to in-person activities around campus and student outcomes. Findings expand insights of development and mental health across much of this generation-defining event.

In this study, we considered connections between the content of immediate trauma narratives and longitudinal trajectories of negative symptoms, to address questions about the timing and predictive value of collected trauma narratives. Participants (N = 68) who were admitted to the emergency department of a metropolitan hospital provided narrative recollections of the traumatic event that brought them into the hospital that day. Participants were then assessed at intervals over the next twelve months for depressive and posttraumatic symptom severity. Linguistic analysis identified words involving affect (positive and negative emotions), sensory input (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell), cognitive processing (thoughts, insights, and reasons), and temporal focus (past, present, and future) within the narrative content. In participants’ same-day narratives of the trauma, past-focused utterances predicted greater decreases in depressive symptom severity over the next year, d = -0.13, whereas cognitive process utterances predicted more severe posttraumatic symptom severity across time points, d = 0.32. Interaction analyses suggested that individuals who used fewer past-focused and more cognitive process utterances within their narratives tended to report more severe depressive and posttraumatic symptom severity across time, ds = 0.31 to 0.34. Overall, these findings suggest that, in addition to other demographics and baseline symptom severity, early narrative content can serve as an informative marker for longitudinal psychological symptoms, even before extensive narrative processing and phenomenological meaning-making have occurred.