Thank you for the opportunity to review the article titled “Aligning Personal and Collective Interests in Emerging Adults during the COVID-19 Emergency in Italy.” I commend the authors on their research in this important area of study. The study offers valuable insights into how emerging adults in Italy may align personal and community-based factors in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the research, to understand if/how these factors inform the appraise of COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) and in turn attitudes toward preventing contagion in Italy, is timely and relevant to both the field of psychology as well as a broader audience interested in how we can slow the spread of COVID-19.

The authors use structural equation modeling to identify positive associations between personal and communal variables with civic engagement, in turn predicting appraisal of COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) and attitudes toward preventing contagion in Italy. Structural equation modeling is a method that clearly helps them to explore their hypotheses about associated relationships between variables. The study is original in its consideration of multiple psychological factors in relation to COVID responses among emerging adults. The manuscript is focused and well-organized. The conclusions of the study are consistent with the evidence and clearly address the main aim. The authors determine that community-based factors mediate the relationship between personal factors (i.e., civic competencies and independent self-construal) and appraisal of PHEM, and subsequently attitudes toward behaviors preventing contagion in Italy. The figures are comprehensive and informative. The tables are clear.

I offer comments and suggestions that I hope will help the authors move forward with their manuscript.

1. Please edit the abstract to reflect your modified sample of participants.

2. On page 5, lines 33-40, you argue that more research on emerging adults’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic is needed, yet you do cite studies that have examined emerging adults’ response to COVID. Please further clarify what is still missing in the research. For example, one thought that comes to mind is that it is important to understand how emerging adults in different national and cultural contexts respond; given the fact that we are indeed in a pandemic, it would be important to understand what universal and contextual factors must be addressed across nations to slow the spread of COVID. Conversely, it may more simply be that the mixed literature thus far suggests that further research is needed to understand under what conditions and for whom is emerging adulthood associated with a particular response to COVID. Please clarify.

3. When you introduce PDY on page 6, you do not reference the commonly used 5 C’s (or 6 C’s if you include contribution). Yet, on page 7 you do connect psychological resources to two of the C’s. To add consistency to this section, I suggest adding a sentence on page 12 to introduce PYD in terms of the 5 C’s and thus prepare the reader to make those connections on page 13. That said, it is not clear to me how interdependent self-construal aligns with caring- I had interpreted this variable as aligning more with a sense of connection. Perhaps a brief definition of each of the 5 C’s, or the ones relevant to your study, would help elucidate these connections.

4. Also on page 6, please clarify the extent to which PYD is applied to emerging adults. More commonly, PYD is examined in relation to adolescents. Thus, please justify the use of a PYD framework with emerging adults. Similarly, is the RFCDC is a framework commonly used with youth, emerging adults, and/or adults?

5. On page 8, line 40, please revise the sentence for clarity. I suggest: “rather than as connected to others” instead of “rather than for themselves as as connected to others.”

6. Please move the Data Analysis Plan section to the method, or otherwise justify why it is at the beginning of the findings.

7. In the Data Analysis Plan section, I suggest adding more information about the interpretation of CFA results for each study variable. What were the CFI, RMSEA, and SRMR cut-offs for good fit? Also, please explain why you used robust maximum likelihood estimation for three variables (attitudes toward behaviors to prevent contagions, RFCDC scale, and PHEM) while you used maximum likelihood estimation for the other variables. Finally, were the CFA analyses also completed in Mplus 7?

8. On page 20, line 54, please clarify the latter part of this sentence: “simply correlated with no specific regression path linking them were rejected.”

9. Please revise the phrase on page 21, line 24 from “governments” to “government”: “designed by the governments to prevent the spread of infection.”

10. On page 26, line 13, please change “This kind of activities” to “these kinds of activities.”

11. On page 26, line 22, the sentence beginning with “Furthermore” is very unclear to me. Please revise the sentence for clarity.

12. In the discussion section, you twice reference the consolidation of civic competence and civic engagement behaviors. Each time I read this phrase, I was a bit confused. I know you explain in the introduction how these psychological variables collectively contribute to emerging adults’ development, but I think it would be useful in the discussion to clarify what you mean, at least the first time you use this phrase (page 27, line 17).

13. You added as a limitation that students enrolled in psychology and social science classes are more likely to identify as women, and then later state that may be different than the general population in terms of community civic engagement. Please add a sentence that explains why these students may be different. Please clarify if you mean that women or students enrolled in social sciences may be different, or both.