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.

China and India are gradually using the overseas Chinese community to form economic ties, spread culture and knowledge, provide investment support, and offer diplomatic support. Diaspora engagement generally refers to a tool for soft power projection or a bilateral relationship established between the government in the homeland and the expatriate community. Both ways in this paper fail to recognize the independence of diasporic communities and the political power of host countries. Singapore and Malaysia are selected as cases to compare China's increasingly coordinated party-state approach to overseas Chinese affairs with India's network-centred architecture of diaspora engagement. Building on Rajesh Rai's scholarship of transnational networks, changing identities and the demand to address migrants' new allegiances sensitively, this paper presents a host-state-embedded network system for diaspora economic diplomacy. It is thought that the impact of diaspora engagement depends on four interrelated conditions: the strength of connectivity with the homeland-state, the richness of transnational economic and social networks, the autonomy and host-country embedding of diaspora actors, and the ability to convert relationships into mutual economic benefits. China has institutional concentration that can rapidly mobilize resources and link business, talents and cultural networks, but it is also politically sensitive when ethnic ties are believed to have blurred the line between cultural ties and foreign political organisation. India has a less centralised system, and programmes such as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, Overseas Citizenship of India, knowledge networks and cultural engagement operate through relatively plural and voluntary associations. Singapore and Malaysia show that neither the Chinese nor the Indian communities can be considered extensions of the ancestral homeland. Citizenship, class, language, generation and the political system at home all shape people's identity and interests. Therefore, diaspora-based competition in Southeast Asia will not be a simple zero-sum game, according to the article. The more sustainable model is one in which diasporic networks act as bridges for trade, technology, entrepreneurship and social exchange, and host-state sovereignty and diaspora autonomy remain explicit constraints on engagement with the homeland.

National defense education is a crucial aspect of fulfilling the fundamental task of fostering students' moral character and talents in universities. Currently, national defense education in universities faces issues such as low student participation and weak educational effectiveness, which are partly due to the difficulty of educational forms in adapting to the professional characteristics of art students, who are active in thinking and value practical experience. This study takes the School of Art of a certain university as an example. Based on a review of relevant domestic and international literature, and through stratified random sampling surveys, it analyzes the current practical dilemmas and group differences in national defense education from four dimensions: participation, satisfaction, implementation effectiveness, and educational forms. The study finds that innovative activities integrating art and national defense education can significantly enhance students' participation enthusiasm and satisfaction, but there are significant gender and grade differences. Therefore, a "curriculum-practice-culture" trinity educational system should be constructed, and support should be strengthened from four aspects: teachers, policies, bases, and evaluation, in order to effectively enhance the effectiveness of education.

This study investigates how the degree of selfie editing among 15-20-year-old girls affects appearance anxiety. Building on previous research on the driving forces of selfie editing and its psychological mechanisms, it tests whether implicit self-objectification mediates the link, and whether state self-compassion moderates these effects. Data from young social media users were collected via self-report appearance anxiety and self-compassion scale, and an Implicit Association Test (IAT), analyzed with mediation, moderation, and moderated mediation models in SPSSAU. Heavy selfie editing but not light selfie editing was found to significantly increase appearance anxiety, with this effect being fully driven by implicit self-objectification. Results also revealed a masking mediation effect: the indirect effect through implicit self-objectification was positive and significant, while the direct effect was negative but non-significant, suggesting that the anxiety-increasing effect operates through automatic cognitive processes rather than immediate emotional responses. State self-compassion only buffered the effects of heavy editing, and weakened both the path to implicit self-objectification and the direct path to anxiety. Future research should use longitudinal designs and diverse samples to explore long-term dynamics and generalizability.

The evolution of teacher education paradigms is not a linear succession but a dialectical process in which three enduring concerns—quality, efficiency, and equity—are continually renegotiated and reconfigured in response to changing historical conditions. This article traces the transformation of teacher education in the United States from the university-based professionalization paradigm (1.0), through the market-driven efficiency paradigm (2.0), to the community-embedded humanistic paradigm (3.0). This trajectory reveals the core tensions and internal logic of teacher education reform and thus provides a necessary starting point for envisioning future paradigms. Generative artificial intelligence and related digital-intelligence technologies have created an epochal rupture that existing paradigms cannot adequately address. The article argues that a future-oriented paradigm must achieve a dialectical synthesis of historical experience: preserving the professional ethos of the 1.0 paradigm, refining the data-informed orientation of the 2.0 paradigm, and deepening the equity commitment of the 3.0 paradigm. On this basis, it proposes a systematic reconstruction of teachers' core competencies within a human-machine-society collaborative framework.

Pragmatic inference enables listeners to derive speakers' intended meanings beyond literal expressions. However, little is known about whether previously generated pragmatic inferences can be effectively revised when subsequent information conflicts with them. The present study investigated the dynamic processing of pragmatic inference revision using natural conversational materials. Participants completed a self-paced reading task with three conditions: conversational implicature revision (CI + revision), conversational implicature without revision (CI - revision), and no conversational implicature with no revision (C). Accuracy and response times were recorded to examine the effects of conflicting information on subsequent comprehension. The results showed that accuracy in the "CI + revision" condition was significantly lower than that in both "CI – condition" and "C" conditions, whereas the latter two conditions did not differ significantly. Moreover, response times in the CI + revision condition were significantly longer than those in the other two conditions, with no significant difference between them. These findings indicate that pragmatic inference revision increases processing difficulty, not because pragmatic inference itself imposes additional costs, but because previously established pragmatic interpretations must be reanalyzed when contradicted by subsequent information. The results suggest that pragmatic inferences remain partially activated after revision and continue to influence comprehension. This study extends previous research on conversational implicature by highlighting the dynamic updating processes involved in pragmatic meaning construction.

This article examines how recipient actions come to count as returns in structurally asymmetrical and publicly mediated gift relations. It focuses on gift-giving between young Chinese women in K-pop fandom and their idols, where gifts may later reappear in livestreams, photographs, performances, or fan interactions. Still, the meaning of these appearances remains uncertain. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography, participant observation, and interviews with 18 Chinese women aged 18 to 23, the article develops the concept of relational return to describe how a giver links a later recipient action to an earlier gift and interprets it as a meaningful response. It also introduces relational precedent to explain how an earlier return enters relationship history and shapes expectations of later response without creating a debt or guarantee. The findings show that material traceability, timing, repeated use, and public visibility help participants attribute actions to earlier gifts, while later absences, repairs, and changes in an object's trajectory can revise their meaning. The article contributes a temporal account of reciprocity under asymmetry.

The popularization of new media technologies has reshaped the cognitive patterns and growth environment of secondary vocational school students, and also posed brand-new challenges to the teaching mode, content carriers and education logic of traditional moral education classrooms in secondary vocational schools. As a core course for implementing the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education and cultivating high-quality technical and skilled personnel, moral education in secondary vocational schools urgently needs to advance teaching reform in adaptation to the characteristics of new media communication. Based on the vocational and practical education characteristics of secondary vocational education, this paper analyzes the practical significance of new media enabling moral education teaching in secondary vocational schools, sorts out four core dilemmas existing in current classroom teaching: lagging concepts, rigid content, single form and weak teaching faculty, and puts forward concrete and implementable reform paths from four dimensions: resource reconstruction, classroom empowerment, evaluation innovation and teacher quality improvement. It aims to solve the problem of insufficient effectiveness of traditional moral education teaching, promote the transformation of moral education classrooms in secondary vocational schools from one-way indoctrination teaching to immersive, interactive and normalized education, and effectively improve the ideological and moral literacy and professional humanistic literacy of secondary vocational school students.