Moreover, the prolonged public health measures that include quarantine physical distancing and restricted access to entertainment, sports, social meetups, traveling, as well as religious and family gatherings, further tested the limits of his/her coping ability of an individual as a result of the reduced available stress-relief activities, including physical activities ( Faulkner et al., 2020) and social support ( Marroquín et al., 2020). The surge in psychiatric symptoms was indicative of the pervasive negative impact by the stress brought upon by the pandemic and its ramifications ( Brooks et al., 2020 Fitzpatrick et al., 2020 Serafini et al., 2020). Unfortunately, the early prediction of the researchers became a reality across the world (Canada Dozois, 2020 United States Sanderson et al., 2020 India Banerjee and Bhattacharya, 2020 Kene, 2020 China Wang et al., 2020 Wu et al., 2020 Italy Marazziti et al., 2020 Korea Park and Park, 2020 Chile Caqueo-Urízar et al., 2020). At the early stage of the pandemic, researchers from various parts of the world had already forewarned a pending debacle of the mental health of the public ( Cullen et al., 2020 Galea et al., 2020 Rossi et al., 2020). Since then, the unpredictable and global spread of the COVID-19 virus had instigated an unsettling multilayered impact on our world, from healthcare crisis to communal lockdowns and eventual economic recession ( United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2020). On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) as a worldwide pandemic ( World Health Organization, 2020). “ Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” and is as necessary to life as the act of breathing-Lewis Latimer The results of the studies were consistent with our hypothesis that TO as measured by LAS-B serves as a buffer against the impact of COVID-19 suffering on life satisfaction. In study 2, the buffering effect of TO on the association between suffering experiences during COVID-19 and life satisfaction in adults was examined. The five factors (i.e., affirmation, acceptance, courage, faith, and self-transcendence) provided a good data model fit statistics for LAS-B the measure had adequate-to-strong internal and latent construct reliability estimates. In study 1, the results showed that the factorial structure of a 15-item LAS-Brief (LAS-B), which is a short measure of TO, replicated the original structure of the 32-item long version. This study explains why only a faith-based TO could serve as a buffer against suffering at the Nazi death camps as well as the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The Life Attitudes Scale (LAS) was designed to measure tragic optimism (TO)-a distinct type of optimism that could generate hopeless hope even in dire situations according to existential positive psychology (PP 2.0).

4Department of Psychology, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada.

3International Network on Personal Meaning, Toronto, ON, Canada.2Department of Psychological Counseling and Guidance, Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Burdur, Turkey.1Independent Researcher, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Tragic optimism examples