Related Research Initiatives Developed in Collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo

Financial anxiety can be defined as a psychosocial syndrome that results in someone having an unhealthy attitude toward thinking about, engaging with, or effectively administering their financial situation (Grable et al., 2015; Shapiro and Burchell, 2012). Financial anxiety at the moment does not represent a clinical entity characterized by formal diagnostic criteria. Despite this, on one side it is conceived as an anxiety phenomenon characterized by a set of behavioral, affective, and cognitive answers of the individual to the perception of a danger or a threat to one’s physical or psychological health and integrity (APA, American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Conversely, it would be simplistic to underestimate its specific features, focus, and behavioral adjustments. In fact, along with typical and generic anxious symptoms (e.g., sleep disturbances, fatigue, headache, and migraine), financial anxiety is best characterized by a sense of helplessness, low self-esteem, resignation, irresponsibility, and avoidance of all the stimuli related to financial and economic issues.

The recent years, characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic and major geopolitical crises, have brought several abrupt social changes, which in turn heavily affected mental health. One of the most widespread consequences of worldwide upset is financial anxiety or the sense of unsafety about one’s economic condition. Despite the evidence of its weight in individual and societal lives, it is commonly regarded merely as a subtype of anxiety state. Accordingly, so far, objective factors and a few subjective characteristics related to financial anxiety have been considered. However, a multidimensional model of this phenomenon including cognitive, personality, and physiological traits is strongly required. The impact of financial anxiety on mental health and dysfunctional economic behavior compels the adoption of a multifaceted research approach to develop clinical, economic, and political measures to support the individual and society.

The project aims to define a consistent framework to describe, define, and mitigate financial anxiety in the Italian general population. Specifically, an innovative multifaceted approach, including psychopathological, cognitive, and behavioral traits is adopted for a twofold goal: to develop a questionnaire to assess financial anxiety consistently with the multifaceted model, and b) to develop an intervention strategy focused on metacognitive, cognitive, and behavioral exercises, able to overcome and/or integrate the limitations of traditional psychotherapeutic approaches.

In the last 20 years, a profound renewal in the conceptual paradigm concerning disability has been raised. In 2001, the World Health Organization developed a bio-psycho-social model that eventually underpinned the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). In this multifaceted perspective, disability is conceived as the product of the interaction between individual factors and the context where the individual lives or acts. As a consequence, disability may have roots a) in the limited capacity of the individual himself/herself in some functional domain, b) in the environment due to the presence of barriers or vice-versa to the lack of facilitators, or, finally, c) in the interaction between these factors. An area of life where this framework can be purposefully applied is work. In Italy, the employment rate of people with disabilities aged 15-64 years old and who, despite restrictions in sensory, motor, or intellectual functions, can work ranges from 31.3% to 35.8%.

To date, corporate culture, inclusion, and accommodations represent the most frequent issues debated when challenging the work adjustment of people with disabilities. However, there are some additional job strains whose relevance in the last years has grown in analyses of the quality of work life, in particular technostress (TS), cognitive overload (COL), and aging (AG). These phenomena are deemed to play a crucial role in jeopardizing the adjustment of workers. The present study aimed to contribute to filling this gap and, for the first time, tackle some unexplored issues concerning the adjustment of people with disabilities in the working context. To this end, we enrolled a relatively large sample of people with sensory disabilities (PwSD). This allowed us to focus specifically on the challenges present at work, such as people having had atypical sensory input development and availability at the time of the assessment. The main aims of this study were a) to investigate organizational features as perceived by PwSD in Italy and their job satisfaction and accessibility, and b) to explore for the first time possible differences between PwSD and people with typical development (PwTD) on three specific job strains, namely, TS, COL, and AG. 

At a descriptive level, results highlighted that the perceived quality of life for PwSD in the workplace appears to be reasonably satisfactory. However, various concerns were brought to light, revealing notable differences between the hearing-impaired and visually impaired-cohorts. Moreover, while PwSD displayed reduced scores in the TS questionnaire compared to PwTD, the opposite occurred for the AG questionnaire. Increasing age was related to TS and AG in the PwTD, but only to AG in PwSD. In conclusion, our study showed that in the Italian work context, older adults tend to show greater difficulties in adjustment to work, regardless of disability. Moreover, inclusivity and quality of life for PwSD, although moderately satisfying, still represent a challenge. Our study investigated for the first time specific job strains in PwSD, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of adjustment to work in this population.

In the last decades, the contribution of information and computer technology (ICT) to working activities is undoubtedly huge. ICT remarkably enhances the speed of task management, allows the worker to increase productivity, facilitates rapid and massive access to information, facilitates the communication processes, even from remote, supports decision-making operations, and, last but not least, empowers multitasking activities. Such potentials would authorize us to speak of the informatics revolution in the world of work, as a stage after the industrial revolution. In particular, the recent pandemic of Covid-19 strongly showed the crucial role of ICT in supporting working activities in several fields, even if demanding a heavy adjustment.

However, the widespread use of ICT and its increasing dependence upon it, has led to a paradox, that is a detrimental human-computer relationship, characterized by a high level of distress, a lower efficiency, and several side effects. This aspect has been defined as “the dark side of technologies” to underline how the backlash of massive use of ICT consists in progressively poorer exploitation of cognitive resources, less efficient self-monitoring, and thus a decrease in accuracy of working performance, a less efficient ability to elaborate new information and stimuli, increasing risk of cognitive overload and higher levels of technostress. Dysfunctional ICT use can exacerbate work-related stress, occurring when job demands do not match a worker’s capabilities, resources, and needs, thus jeopardizing an individual’s emotions, well-being, and health in everyday working life.

The main aim of this study is to draw a multilevel framework able to provide a deeper understanding of HCI, including the investigation of demographic, cognitive, and psychological correlates of HCI. Indeed, it remains still unclear what cognitive styles, cognitive processes, and personality traits may facilitate or conversely avert HCI, the type of relationship between demographic, work, and environmental variables and HCI, and again, what specific needs people with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) in adulthood may manifest when interacting with computers in the work environment. The second aim is to develop and validate an intervention strategy (training) to facilitate HCI in the workplace.

Organizational stress has been a central area of interest in the academic literature for decades since it constitutes an important aspect of business performance and overall success. A significant volume of published studies has focused on the stress caused by Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in the work environment, called ‘technostress’ (TS). Technostress refers to the stress experienced by individuals in organizations due to the extended use of ICTs. However, some additional strains deserve attention due to their detrimental impact on quality of life in the workplace. In particular, we refer to cognitive overload and aging. The former implies the sensation of fatigue and exhaustion due to a disproportion between the task demands and the amount of mental and cognitive resources at any given time. The latter refers to the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes required to adapt to age-related functional and cognitive changes in the workplace.

Our study challenges these three dimensions, each with a specific questionnaire and training to mitigate the detrimental effects of these phenomena on workers’ well-being and to enhance individual resources necessary for successful adaptation in the workplace.