PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES, cilt.248, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
Pre-service teachers' future time perceptions may affect their professional success and psychological well-being. Therefore, understanding how personality traits and burnout levels shape these perceptions is critical for sustainable teacher development in education. The study examines the impact of personality traits and burnout levels on the pre-service teachers' future time perceptions. Data collected from 1313 pre-service teachers were analyzed by employing a hybrid "Structural Equation Modeling" (SEM) and "Artificial Neural Networks" (ANN) approach. The findings revealed that pre-service teachers' future time perceptions are significantly related to certain personality traits and burnout levels. SEM results indicated that extraversion and openness to experience personality traits positively predict future time perceptions, whereas emotional exhaustion and mental exhaustion negatively predict future time perceptions. The sensitivity analysis conducted to rank the importance of each construct in the ANN model revealed that openness to experience emerged as the most influential factor, followed by emotional exhaustion, extraversion, and mental exhaustion.