*Limitations*

Some limitations should be mentioned. First, one concern addresses the missing information about the region in which the participants were living while answering the survey. Indeed, although the current pandemic extended from North to South Italy, during data collection, some regions were in a complete lockdown, whereas others had weaker restrictive measures owing to the virus's lower incidence rate. This may likely have affected the participants' response set and their scores on the investigated variables. From this point of view, we are unsure whether our participants can be considered as a representative sample of the Italian population, or whether they better reflect the situation of the country's specific regions. We suggest future studies address this issue to establish the extent to which the results obtained from the study sample can be generalized to the population to which it refers. Second, we did not explore the influence of other work-related stressors on the degree of occupational stress. For instance, we did not examine how the different changes in working conditions, such as alterations of salary, decrease in working hours, or shifts to teleworking, affected the participants' perceived level of occupational stress during the pandemic. In fact, a substantial portion of our sample declared that several working conditions changed after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they were taken into account purely at a descriptive level. In particular, we did not investigate the extent to which the transition toward smart working, which implies the need of new organizations and new habits into the family environment, affects occupational stress during the current circumstances. From this perspective, a broader and deeper analysis of any possible stressors generated by the new condition of working at home and by the time and spaces sharing with other family members during a working day should be conducted. Additional research should be aimed at exploring how these stressors influence occupational stress during the global emergency. A further limitation consists of the cross-sectional nature of the study, which prevents us from making inferences on the sequences of events, and there is no information on whether and how the pandemic has changed the associations among the investigated variables. Future longitudinal studies may provide a better knowledge and understanding of the relationships examined.
