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This study aims to analyze the effect of internship participation on university graduates’ overall employability and uses Korea’s Graduate Occupational Mobility Survey data in order to track university graduates’ employment prospects. Our findings reveal that participation in internships increases the employability of young adults, and that this impact is slightly greater for male college graduates than for female college graduates. Meanwhile, in order to supplement the reliability of our results, we conducted additional analytical tests, including a placebo test and an intensive sensitivity analysis test. It turns out that the estimated treatment effects on the placebo outcomes are of a small magnitude, with no statistical significance. In the analysis which includes simulated confounders, it appears that the risk of omitting relevant confounders does not threaten the baseline estimates.

This research involved 88 young adults aged between 20 years and 35 years from two different countries, Spain and Italy. This work aims to explore preferences of the two groups toward synthetic voices, created for the experiment with variations in gender and quality for each language. The Spanish group was asked to evaluate the two high-quality voices of Elena and Pablo and the two low-quality voices of Maria and Juan while the Italian group was asked to assess the high-quality voices of Giulia and Antonio and the low-quality voices of Clara and Edoardo. The shortened and digitized version of the Virtual Agent Voice Acceptance Questionnaire (VAVAQ) was administered, respectively, in the Spanish or Italian version on the basis of the referring group to collect participants’ preferences. Due to the pandemic situation, participants were mainly contacted via email. Each participant was provided with a specific link. Outcomes revealed that Spanish and Italian young adults showed a greater appreciation toward the high-quality female voice compared to the other proposed voices. Regarding participants’ cross-cultural differences, Italian participants seem to judge the voices as more emotionally engaging than the Spanish participants whereas Spanish participants consider the audited voices as more natural and expressive than the Italian participants.

Depression is a significant public health issue, particularly in young adults of university age, and it is important to explore a protective factor to minimize the adverse effects of negative emotions. This study examined the mediating role of two hope components, agency thinking and pathways thinking, in the association between negative emotions and depressive symptoms in university students. Three hundred and fifteen Chinese undergraduates (211 females and 104 males) participated in this study (mean age = 22.08 years; SD = 2.74). The participants were invited to complete a self-administered online questionnaire measuring negative emotions, hope and depressive symptoms. In terms of bootstrapped mediation testing, the results indicated that negative emotions were partially associated with depressive symptoms through pathways thinking, but not agency thinking. These findings consolidate the complex nature of hope, and suggest that hope (through pathways thinking in particular) can be a protective factor in terms of university students' psychological outcomes. Possible explanations and clinical implications of our findings are discussed.