This study examines how economic uncertainty, family expectations and intended university majors are associated with future anxiety among international high-school students in China. An exploratory online survey collected 77 valid responses from students at the researcher's school. Descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations were used to compare six intended-field groups. The findings indicate that major choice operates partly as a strategy for managing employment and income risks, although students also value autonomy, personal interest and meaningful work. Anxiety was visible through concerns about technological change, perceived parental expectations, peer comparison and the possibility of achieving an externally successful but unfulfilling life. Undecided students displayed particularly strong uncertainty, but the survey cannot determine whether anxiety causes indecision. The study argues that career anxiety should be understood not only as an individual psychological condition, but also as a response to labor-market change, family investment and competing expectations about a secure and meaningful future.

With the rapid development of the new media industry, social media has been widely adopted and has attracted considerable public attention. The presentation of personal images on social networking and short-video platforms has evolved into an important form of everyday expression and social interaction. Consequently, refined, idealized, and homogeneous aesthetic standards have emerged and spread extensively across online platforms, gradually solidifying into a standardized notion of the "perfect" persona that constrains public aesthetic perception and profoundly shapes individuals' aesthetic cognition and self-identity. Existing studies on aesthetics and appearance anxiety have primarily focused on macro-level social phenomena, yet few have adopted the development of self-media as a central perspective to examine the deeper negative impacts of its standardized aesthetic system on the public. This study investigates the aesthetics generated through self-media image presentation by analyzing the construction logic and dissemination pathways of "perfect" online images and exploring how they influence public mental health, contribute to the homogenization of aesthetic preferences, and subsequently encourage critical reflection. The findings reveal that the emergence and evolution of homogeneous aesthetic standards on short-video platforms follow a rigid and institutionalized logic that profoundly shapes individuals' self-perception. Reconstructing personal aesthetic frameworks and fostering a pluralistic aesthetic system are therefore identified as the key strategies for addressing this issue.

Online public opinion reversals expose users to information that conflicts with previously expressed judgments, creating conditions for cognitive dissonance. Yet little is known about how users reduce such dissonance across issue contexts. This study used theory-driven quantitative content analysis to compare reduction strategies in three selected Sina Weibo reversal events concerning education, consumer affairs, and entertainment. A corpus of 990 eligible first-level comments, with 330 comments from each event, was coded into seven mutually exclusive strategies grouped as disengaging or engaging responses. Frequencies, Pearson chi-square tests, adjusted standardized residuals, Cramér's V, and Holm-adjusted pairwise comparisons were employed. Across the corpus, act rationalization/reformulation was the most frequent strategy (48.28%), followed by quick defense/source disparagement (37.47%), while attitude change was absent. Strategy distributions differed significantly across cases at both the superordinate-category level, χ²(2, N = 990) = 362.782, p < .001, Cramér's V = .605, and the four focal-strategy level, χ²(6, N = 980) = 593.138, p < .001, Cramér's V = .550. The education case showed a near balance between engaging and disengaging responses and comparatively frequent trivialization. The consumer-affairs case was dominated by engaging responses, especially act rationalization/reformulation, whereas the entertainment case was dominated by disengaging responses, particularly quick defense/source disparagement. These findings indicate that publicly expressed dissonance-reduction strategies vary across selected events and may be shaped by their practical relevance, identity involvement, and discursive structure. The study extends cognitive dissonance research by demonstrating how online reduction strategies differ across issue contexts.