Ricerc@Sapienza

Promoting individuals' mental well-being is gaining increasing attention in the political agenda in Italy and Europe, especially nowadays when the long-lasting psychosocial effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are still unclear. Although a large body of research stressed the importance of self-oriented psychological characteristics to improve people's mental well-being (e.g., self-awareness, intrapersonal emotion regulation, emotional stability), some authors highlighted the importance of individuals' prosociality, an other-oriented tendency to behave in favor of others, as a protective factor for their well-being. Using both cross-sectional data and intensive longitudinal data (daily and weekly diaries), the present study aims to offer an ecologically valid evaluation of the benefits of prosociality on mental well-being among young adults (roughly ages 20-39), a developmental group partly under-investigated in the prosociality literature. More in detail, we will seek to clarify: (1) the consistency of the effects of prosociality on several facets of mental well-being (e.g., life satisfaction, happiness, etc.); (2) the extent to which these expected beneficial effects could be attributed to stable dispositional differences (trait-like) and/or occasion-specific peaks in prosociality (state-like); and (3) the lasting nature of such effects as a function of the time-lag considered (i.e., in synchronous, day-to-day, and week-to-week). The practical implications of this project could be important for those psychologists, educators, and practitioners working to develop intervention strategies to sustain the well-being of young adults (e.g., university students) in their everyday life.