The role of the Intolerance of Uncertainty and Non-pathological Worry on Italian Young Adults’ Mental Health: An Exploratory Study with Serial Mediation Models

The complexity of the developmental tasks of the transition to adulthood, already exacerbated by economic and social difficulties, has more recently been compounded by collective traumatic events such as the pandemic and war. This set of factors has fostered an increasingly anxious representation of the future, experiences of uncertainty and pervasive worries in young adults. These factors are capable of affecting young adults' mental health and, in the Italian context, it represents an emergency. The relationship between Dark Future Time Perspective (or Future Anxiety), a construct recently introduced in Italy, and several negative mental health outcomes is reported in the literature, although the effect of possible mediating variables on it has not been investigated yet. In order to shed new light on this 'malaise-causing' relationship, the present study explores the joint mediating effect of Intolerance of Uncertainty and Non-pathological Worry in the relationship between Future Anxiety and Psychological Distress in a group of 302 young Italian adults (18 - 30 years; M = 21.9; SD = 2.6). Findings of the three serial mediation models conducted reveal a significant and positive direct effect of Future Anxiety on Intolerance of Uncertainty and Non-pathological Worry, as well as on self-reported levels of Stress and Depression. In all mediation models, Intolerance of Uncertainty and Non-pathological Worry positively mediate the relationship between Future Anxiety and Psychological Distress. The combined effect of the two mediators highlights how young adults with greater Future Anxiety experience more Intolerance of Uncertainty, which positively affects their Non-pathological Worry levels, thus exacerbating psychological distress. This serial relationship is particularly visible in the Anxiety model where the joint effect of mediators on the investigated relationship generates a fully-mediated serial model. Subsequent sensitivity analyses confirmed these results. Finally, the results indicate that female participants experienced more Stress, Anxiety and Depression in relation to Future Anxiety than the male counterpart. The exploration of the relationships among the variables selected for the present study and its results open up to new trajectories for the understanding of the sources of youth distress and contribute to the design of targeted intervention projects.