ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2026
Youth anxiety in an age of uncertainty: future insecurity, career stress, and the mechanisms of identity exploration during major life transitions.
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
This study examines how young adults in China experience well-being under conditions of social uncertainty, focusing on the joint associations among future anxiety, career stress, identity exploration, rural normative pressure, and subjective well-being. Informed by cultural-psychological perspectives, the proposed model integrates multiple indirect associations and contextual moderation within a single structural framework. Using survey data from 260 undergraduate students, structural equation modeling and regression-based analyses showed that future anxiety was positively associated with career stress (β = 0.637, p <.001) and identity exploration (β = 0.346, p <.001), and negatively associated with well-being (β = -0.383, p <.001). career stress was positively associated with identity exploration (β = 0.316, p <.001) and negatively associated with well-being (β = -0.300, p <.001), whereas identity exploration was positively associated with well-being in the multivariate model (β = 0.265, p <.001). Bootstrap analyses further indicated a significant negative indirect association between future anxiety and well-being through career stress (β = -0.190, p <.001), a significant positive indirect association through identity exploration (β = 0.091, p <.001), and a significant sequential indirect association through career stress and identity exploration (β = 0.053, p <.001), although the total indirect effect was not significant. Rural normative pressure significantly but modestly moderated the association between career stress and identity exploration (β = 0.105, p = .040), such that this positive relationship became stronger at higher levels of normative pressure. Overall, the findings suggest that future-oriented uncertainty, career-related pressure, and identity-related reflection are closely intertwined in young people's lives, and that sociocultural norms shape how pressure is translated into developmental self-reflection. The results underscore the importance of educational and social interventions that support not only stress reduction, but also identity-related meaning-making and context-sensitive developmental adaptation in uncertain social environments.
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