Passion for Studying and Its Relationships with Academic Burnout and Mental Health: Longitudinal Insights into Sustainable Students’ Functioning

Passion for studying represents a crucial motivational resource in students’ academic functioning, yet its role remains complex. Based on Vallerand’s dualistic model of passion, this paper examines how harmonious and obsessive study passion relate to students’ well-being, academic burnout, and dropout intentions. Across three complementary studies, we employed a multi-method approach combining cross-sectional correlational analyses (N = 142), longitudinal structural equation modeling (N = 100), and Bayesian psychological network analysis (N = 132). The results consistently indicated that harmonious passion was positively associated with well-being and negatively with burnout, psychological distress, and dropout intentions. Longitudinal findings confirmed its predictive role, showing that harmonious passion at the beginning of the semester protected against exhaustion and disengagement later on. In contrast, obsessive passion demonstrated weaker and less consistent associations, functioning mainly through links with anxiety in the network structure. Together, these findings suggest that harmonious passion acts as a central protective factor in students’ academic and emotional adjustment, whereas obsessive passion may represent a potential risk under certain conditions. By identifying the motivational and emotional mechanisms that sustain students’ well-being and engagement, this study contributes to the goals of sustainable education, emphasizing the creation of learning environments that support development of harmonious passion for studying, with its beneficial effects for long-term mental health.