Silvia Caldaroni

Background and Aims: Medical students and junior doctors undergo rigorous acad emic, clinical and personal demands during early adulthood, a period characterized by identity formation and major life transitions. These pressures contribute to high rates of burnout, diminished motivation and impaired professional development. Personality traits and integrated personality profiles are increasingly recognized as influential factors shaping individuals' responses to stress, sense of vocational calling and career trajectories. However, few studies have simultaneously applied both variable‐centered and person‐centered approaches within a theoretically grounded framework. This study aims to examine how Cloninger's temperament and character dimensions, as well as validated personality profiles, relate to burnout, sense of calling, research proclivity, and career preferences among medical students and junior doctors in New Zealand. Methods: This cross‐sectional study surveyed medical students from all three campuses of the University of Otago and junior doctors working at Health New Zealand—Christchurch hospitals. Participants completed validated measures of burnout, personality (TCI‐R) and sense of calling, alongside demographic and career preference items. Two‐Step Cluster Analyzes were used to derive temperament, character and integrated personality profiles, constrained to replicate Cloninger's empirically established configurations. Personality profiles were validated using multivariate analyzes of variance. Associations between personality, calling and burnout were examined using correlations, ANOVAs and multiple regressions. Hierarchical regressions assessed whether sense of calling explained additional variance in burnout beyond personality traits. Conclusion: This study provides a comprehensive investigation of the interplay between personality, sense of calling, and burnout within a large cohort of New Zealand medical trainees. By integrating established personality profiles with contemporary educational outcomes, findings are expected to contribute to a better understanding of the associations between these factors, and to inform future research and educational strategies aimed at supporting well‐being, professional identity and sustainable career development.

Understanding the factors associated with children’s pro-environmental intentions is important for developing theory and informing future research on sustainable behavior early in life. At the same time, research with young children often involves small and hard-to-reach samples, making confirmatory modeling difficult. In this exploratory pilot study, we applied psychometric network analysis to examine the pattern of conditional associations among pro-environmental behavior, injunctive norms, descriptive norms, attitude, and intention in 30 Italian 9-year-old children. Because preliminary analyses indicated gender differences in intention and a weaker trend toward gender differences in attitude, these variables were residualized with respect to gender in the main network, and a non-residualized network was estimated as a sensitivity analysis. Overall, the non-residualized and gender-adjusted networks showed a similar core structure. The regularized gender-adjusted network showed its strongest positive edges between descriptive and injunctive norms, between injunctive norms and attitude, and between attitude and intention. Pro-environmental behavior showed only weak direct connections to the rest of the network. Strength and expected influence were both highest for injunctive norms, followed by descriptive norms and attitude. Although these findings are provisional and hypothesis-generating, they illustrate how psychometric network analysis can be applied in small pilot samples to map patterns of conditional associations and inform future confirmatory research.

Personal values are central determinants of pro-environmental engagement, yet most research has examined their effects in isolation, overlooking the fact that individuals typically endorse multiple, potentially conflicting values simultaneously. Adopting a person-centered approach, the present study investigated how configurations of biospheric, altruistic, and egoistic values relate to key climate engagement factors (pro-environmental behavior, belief in climate change, climate-related self-efficacy, and green identity), and negative eco-emotions (anger, fear, and sadness). Data were collected via an online survey from 363 adults (18–76 years, 46.28% female). Latent profile analysis and K-means clustering were applied to identify value-based profiles, with the latter yielding a robust four-cluster solution. The identified clusters comprised eco-altruists (high biospheric and altruistic, low egoistic values), ego-driven contributors (high egoistic, moderate biospheric and altruistic values), detached individuals (low endorsement across values), and self-focused individuals (high egoistic, very low biospheric and altruistic values). These groups differed significantly across all climate engagement factors and eco-emotions. Eco-altruists showed the highest levels of climate engagement factors, but also reported the strongest negative eco-emotions. Self-focused individuals showed the lowest engagement and weakest emotional responses. Ego-driven contributors occupied an intermediate position, indicating that self-transcendent values can attenuate the inhibiting influence of egoistic motivations. Detached individuals displayed moderate engagement despite overall weak value endorsement. The findings highlight the importance of examining value configurations and underscore the need for value-sensitive interventions that promote sustainable behavior while supporting individual well-being.

Introduction: Existing studies highlight a positive correlation between pro-environmental (PEB) and pro-social behavior (PB) at the between-person level, yet overlook their reciprocal relations. This study took a within-person perspective to explore their day-to-day relations and the moderating role of self-transcendence values in strengthening such associations.Method: We employed a daily diary design and recruited 60 Italian young adults (Mean Age = 25.8; SD = 3.6; Women = 58%) who reported their behavior once a day over 21 days.Results: Using Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling, we found no significant day-to-day spillover effect of PB and PEB. However, we identified significant same-day positive associations, namely, on days when individuals engaged in PB, they also showed higher than usual levels of PEB. Additionally, we found positive carryover effects in both PB and PEB, suggesting that young adults are likely to persist in their daily prosocial and pro-environmental efforts. No significant cross-level interaction between self-transcendence values and the spillover effect from PB to PEB was found.Conclusion: The findings provide new insights into young adults’ daily engagement in prosocial and pro-environmental behaviors, highlighting the role of day-to-day within-person changes, while accounting for stable, between-person differences in behavioral and motivational tendencies.Keywords: Pro-environmental behavior, Prosocial behavior; Young adults; Experience Sampling Methods; Spillover; Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling.

Introduction: Existing literature has highlighted the relevance of Pro‐environmental behaviors (PEBs)—actions intended to benefit the environment—to Eudaimonic well‐being (EWB, i.e., meaning in life and connectedness to others). However, most research has focused on stable individual differences and utilized cross‐sectional designs, giving limited attention to the momentary fluctuations of PEBs within individuals. This study aimed to investigate the daily impact of PEBs on EWB from a causal perspective, examining whether manipulating daily PEBs would result in higher levels of EWB on those days. Method: We adopted the Within‐Person Encouragement Design, an experimental approach employing instrumental variable estimation, in a Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling framework. Participants were 63 Italian young adults assessed over 21 days and who received 11 randomized encouragements (i.e., “Today we ask you to implement more pro‐environmental actions than you would normally enact on a typical day”). Results: A significant positive adherence effect of the encouragement on PEB, and a significant positive treatment effect of PEB on EWB was found. Conclusion: These findings are promising for advancing successful behavioral interventions designed to encourage daily PEBs in younger generations and highlight the importance of PEBs for experiencing a more meaningful life and enhanced connectedness with others.

Depression in adolescents has been linked to poor life outcomes, including suicidal ideation, peer victimization, and fewer friendships. Less is known about how depressed adolescents perceive their peer interactions. Based on the depression-distortion model, we expected that adolescents with depressive symptoms misperceive their social ties by being less likely to like some peers, and more likely to dislike other peers. An Italian dataset about adolescent relationships was used, including 275 first-year secondary school students (M age = 11.80, 46% female) in 12 classrooms across nine schools. Adolescents were asked to nominate classmates they liked and disliked. Longitudinal social network analyses (stochastic actor-oriented models) were conducted, including structural network effects (reciprocity, transitivity, indegree-popularity) and covariates such as gender, immigrant origin, and highest parents’ education level. The results indicated that adolescents with depressive symptoms were less likely to send liking nominations, and conversely, they were more likely to send disliking nominations than non-depressed classmates. Interestingly, adolescents with depressive symptoms were not more disliked or less liked by their peers. These findings seem to support the depression-distortion model by suggesting that, compared to non-depressed peers, adolescents with depressive symptoms misperceive their relationships by overstating negative relationships and underestimating positive ones.

Background: Youths' online problematic behaviors, such as smartphone or social network sites (SNS) addiction, gained increasing attention nowadays, due to their impact on concurrent and later adjustment, such as emotional and/or behavioral problems, academic impairments, or relational issues.Aims: This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a pilot school‐based intervention to contrast online addictive behaviors while fostering adolescents' self‐regulative abilities.Materials & Methods: The intervention started in January 2022 in an Italian junior high school located in Rome, and consisted of four meetings with students. A total sample of 462 15‐year‐old adolescents (M_age = 15.2; SD = 0.50; 41% females; N_control = 214; N_intervention = 248) was considered. Within the latent difference score framework, we examined short‐term changes from the pre‐to‐the‐postintervention levels of SNS and smartphone addiction, and self‐regulatory self‐efficacy (SRSE) beliefs as a possible booster of the intervention's effectiveness.Results: Results showed a significant decrease in both online addictions (SNS and smartphone addiction), controlling for age, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status, because of the short‐term efficacy of the project. The buffering effect of SRSE beliefs was further supported.Conclusion: These findings emphasized the usefulness of promoting youths' self‐regulative beliefs to contrast problematic tendencies, according to a Positive Youth Development perspective which focused on resources rather than only on the prevention of negative outcomes for youths' adjustment.