Youths’ Wellbeing Between Future and Uncertainty Across Cultural Contexts: A Focus on Latent Meanings as Mediational Factors

Factors like future time perspective, cultural belongings, and semiotic resources (i.e., individuals' meanings to interpret the world), as well as worrying phenomena (climate change and armed conflicts), can harm wellbeing and increase personal distress. The study, comparing Armenian and Italian contexts, explores whether youths' wellbeing and psychological distress are explained by openness to time perspective, anxiety about uncertainty, and worry regarding climate change and war, as a function of the individual semiotic resources (mapped by <i>Views of Context</i>). Participants were 202 Armenian and 271 Italian young adults (<i>M</i>_age = 21.23, <i>SD</i>_age = 3.35). A Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) applied to <i>Views of Context</i> extracted two dimensions of sense; a second-order MCA aggregated the extracted meanings into three clusters named <i>Orientation towards self-care</i> (CL₁), <i>Social and personal commitment</i> (CL₂), and <i>Absolute devaluation and social detachment</i> (CL₃). Clusters and/or nationality significantly differentiated measures of worry for war and climate change, future time perspective, intolerance of uncertainty, and wellbeing, but not the distress scores, by 3 × 2 ANOVAs. Linear regressions showed future time perspective and intolerance of uncertainty as positive and negative predictors of wellbeing respectively, with a significant <i>Views-of-Context</i> dimension, inversely affecting distress scores. Study highlights youths' latent meanings influence wellbeing and distress, serving as a "starting point" for health promotion interventions sensitive to cultural differences.