Natural environments have been widely recognized for their calming effects on individuals. However, access to such restorative environments can be limited by various circumstances. In these cases, Virtual Reality can be beneficial, as recent studies have shown that immersion in virtual natural environments has effects comparable to those of real nature. Various characteristics of natural environments can potentially influence the benefits they provide to humans. Additionally, the design of VR interventions can impact the experience and emotional response. This review aims to survey the current state of knowledge on the impact of virtual natural environments on emotion elicitation, addressing the types of interventions used in past studies, the variety of natural environments employed, and their differential impacts on emotional valence and arousal. This analysis shows how longer sessions, especially those involving interactive elements such as hand gestures, proved to be the most effective in enhancing emotional and physiological benefits. Among the various types of natural environments used, green spaces, particularly virtual forests, were the most frequently studied and showed consistent effectiveness in both reducing arousal and eliciting positive emotions. These findings can inform the development of new VR interventions designed to foster restoration and enhance positive emotional responses.

Seasonal workers in the tourism sector are exposed to significant psychosocial risks, such as work overload, emotional exhaustion, and precarious employment conditions. Despite growing interest in positive organizational psychology, little is known about how organizational culture impacts perceptions and experiences of seasonal workers in Italy. This study explores the role of positive organizational culture in promoting well-being among seasonal workers in the tourism sector, examining their direct perspectives on organizational climate, work challenges, and individual and organizational resources. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with seasonal workers employed in the hospitality industry in Italy. Data were analyzed through an integrated mixed-method approach combining Grounded Theory methodology with quantitative lexical analysis using T-LAB software, ensuring both analytical rigor and interpretive depth. Five macro-categories emerged inductively from the data: trust and relations, coping strategies and emotions, perceived justice, teamwork, and meaning of work. These were integrated into a core category defined as flourishing at work, interpreted through the lens of Seligman’s PERMA model. These findings suggest that well-being in seasonal work is an active and relational achievement, sustained by emotional self-regulation, perceived fairness, and collective identity. The results carry direct implications for organizational policies and psychosocial risk prevention strategies in precarious work contexts. In particular, positive organizational culture and environments can act as protective factors against psychosocial risks, with direct implications for organizational policies, psychosocial risk prevention, and evidence-based workplace interventions. The specificity of the analysis method offers an original contribution by integrating qualitative and quantitative textual analysis to investigate psychosocial well-being in an under-explored population: Italian seasonal workers.

Sharps injuries and biological exposures remain a leading occupational safety risk in healthcare training environments. Preventing such injuries requires not only trainees’ declarative knowledge of biological hazards, but their threat appraisal—the cognitive process through which individuals evaluate personal risk and that motivates consistent adherence to standard precautions in practice. This cross-sectional study (N = 581) examined whether biological risk knowledge predicts cognitive threat appraisal in Italian health professions students surveyed prior to their first supervised clinical internship, and whether this relationship varies by gender. Drawing on Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), a multiple linear regression showed that biological risk knowledge significantly predicted personalized threat appraisal (β = 0.214, p < 0.001). Gender was also associated with threat appraisal, with female students reporting higher levels than male peers at equivalent knowledge levels (β = 0.184, p = 0.035). The overall model explained 16% of variance in threat appraisal (adjusted R² = 0.150), indicating that mandatory pre-placement occupational safety training is associated with risk appraisal activation, but only partially, and that a causal interpretation requires longitudinal confirmation. These findings suggest that knowledge transmission alone is insufficient to reduce biological risk exposure in clinical settings: appraisal-activating components—including scenario-based learning and near-miss incident review—should be integrated into occupational safety curricula for health professions students, with attention to gender differences in risk perception.

Pediatric oncology nursing is among the highest-intensity care specialties, exposing nurses to repeated child death and sustained emotional investment in family relationships. This occupational burden is a recognized psychosocial risk factor and a driver of compassion fatigue, burnout, and reported intention to leave, yet the organizational and educational determinants of this risk remain poorly captured by existing assessment approaches. This study investigated the lived experiences of nurses caring for terminally ill children in a pediatric onco-hematology unit and hospice ward in central Italy (N = 15), using a qualitative descriptive design, informed by a phenomenological sensibility to lived experience, supported by computer-assisted textual analysis. Structured face-to-face interviews were analyzed through thematic content analysis with stepwise replication, while quantitative textual analysis was performed using T-Lab software to map co-occurrence patterns among key lemmas, providing a frequency-based, semantically grounded picture of nurses’ representations of occupational risk. Seven themes emerged, including quality of nursing care, parental relationships, coping with a child’s death, and impact on personal and professional life. Findings showed that reported intention to leave was associated, in participants’ accounts, with absent psychological debriefing, cumulative emotional burden, inadequate end-of-life training, and a near-total absence of organizational vocabulary for peer-level support—a gap directly visible in the co-occurrence structure of nurses’ language. As a secondary aim, by combining qualitative depth with complementary lexical analysis of thematic patterns, this study also offers a methodological example of how psychosocial risk in high-intensity care settings can be assessed and translated into actionable indicators for organizational climate and workforce well-being. The findings inform concrete prevention strategies and policy recommendations for nursing education and occupational health, consistent with this Special Issue’s focus on methodological innovation for psychosocial risk assessment and public health policy design.

Background: Family firms are a pillar of most national economies, yet the overlap between family and business systems that defines them is also a source of affective strain and group-level tension that can spread across both domains. Sustainable organization management in family firms therefore depends not only on economic performance but on how governance, succession, and daily relational dynamics are managed psychologically. This study examines how the psychological blurring of family and work boundaries affects governance, succession readiness, and employee well-being in a small Italian family-owned manufacturing firm. Methods: A mixed-methods design combined semi-structured interviews with family members active in management (analyzed using conventional qualitative content analysis) with a structured survey administered to non-family employees, measuring supervisor and coworker support, perceived nepotism, organizational trust, organizational identification, burnout, turnover intention, self-rated performance, and job satisfaction. Results: Family members described persistent, largely unmanaged spillover between generational conflict over innovation, decision-making authority, and an informally anticipated but never formalized succession. Employees, by contrast, reported a generally positive climate, but perceived nepotism—although low on average—was consistently associated with lower organizational trust. Conclusions: Family-level emotional dynamics and employee-level perceptions of fairness constitute two only partly overlapping sources of risk to the sustainable management of small family firms, with direct implications for succession planning and human resource practices.