Media Exposure and Vicarious Trauma: Italian Adaptation and Validation of the Media Vicarious Traumatization Scale and Its Impact on Young Adults’ Mental Health in Relation to Con-temporary Armed Conflicts

In recent years, psychological research has explored the impact of media exposure on mental health and well-being. Young adults, already psychologically vulnerable due to the pandemic, are particularly at risk given their high media engagement. The con-struct of Media Vicarious Traumatization (MVT) represents an extension of the vicar-ious trauma framework, developed to capture the potential psychological effects of exposure to emotionally intense media content. MVT therefore offers a valuable per-spective for understanding the mental health consequences of media expo-sure—especially among young adults—and in particular with respect to war, which has become a prominent theme in contemporary media discourse. This study presents the cultural adaptation and psychometric validation process of the Media Vicarious Traumatization Scale (MVTS), along with findings on the relationship between MVTS - specifically calibrated to the war context - generalized anxiety, and future anxiety in young adults. Study I, conducted on a sample of 250 participants (M = 22.40, SD = 2.63), explored the latent structure of the MVTS using Parallel Analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), yielding promising preliminary psychometric properties in terms of reliability and factorial stability. An independent sample of 553 participants (M = 22.43, SD = 2.37) was recruited for Study II, where the latent struc-ture of the MVTS was confirmed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), demonstrating good model fit indices. Furthermore, this second study examined measurement invariance across gender, internal consistency of the instrument, and its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Overall, the MVTS demonstrated robust and stable psychometric properties. Additionally, findings from Study II provide novel insights into the predictive role played not only by war-related MVT but also by the recently introduced construct of Worry about War, in exacerbating both generalized anxiety and future anxiety among Italian young adults.