Thursday 23 July 09:50
- 11:20
Hall: 18 - Room 15 SA
Chair and Presenter:
Delle Fave Antonella
Discussant:
Velasco Veronica
Division: Division 6: Clinical and Community Psychology
Emerging adulthood was identified as a distinct period in life, characterized by specific challenges, opportunities and developmental requirements. It presently comprises youth born between the end of the previous century and the beginning of the present one, labelled as Generation Z. The distinctive developmental feature of this generation of emerging adults is their regular access and fruition of internet-based information and social media through smartphones from pre-adolescence. This unprecedented early exposure to the virtual world, together with the social isolation imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, have been associated with the steady increase in malaise and affective disorders detected among emerging adults across countries. In order to identify strategies to contrast this worrying scenario, this symposium is aimed to explore well-being and daily experience among emerging adults from three European countries, through different methodologies and research instruments. Specifically, Monica Molino presents a study conducted among citizens from Turin (Italy), detecting lower well-being levels in emerging adults, compared to older age groups, and highlighting the need to support youth's social inclusion and civic engagement. Lukasz Kaczmarek discusses results from two experiments and one longitudinal study conducted among Polish youth, showing that video-game practice may foster positive emotions when it is actively shared with others. Gaja Zager Kocjan, through real-time data collected in Slovenia, provides evidence of creativity as a psychological resource contributing to emerging adults' experience of well-being during daily activities, such as learning and academic tasks,routine chores and passive leisure. Antonella Delle Fave summarizes results of a study conducted among college students from 8 Italian universities, focusing on the interplay between positive and negative dimensions of mental health, and highlighting their connection with participants' lifestyle and socioeconomic conditions. The unifying and original conceptual framework underlying the four presentations is the view of mental health as a set of positive emotionalandpsychosocialdimensions,ratherthanthemereabsenceofmentalillness.Thesharedgoalistoidentifypersonalandcontextualresourcesthat couldinforminterventionsaddressingthespecificneedsandchallengesofemergingadults,aswellaspromotingtheirpositivedevelopmentandwell-being.
