Changes in Chinese students' academic emotions after examinations: Pride in success, shame in failure, and self-loathing in comparison

Healthy and successful: Health-behavior goal striving in daily work life

Health behaviors (physical activity and healthy eating) can be an essential part of everyday work life and are relevant for employees' affective states. Many worksite interventions, including goal-striving approaches, have been developed to promote health behavior at work. However, these approaches often neglect that making progress with respect to health-behavior goals necessarily takes place during workday episodes, so that work tasks are accomplished simultaneously. In our study, we aim to advance the understanding of how health-behavior goal progress is facilitated and how reflecting on it evokes affective states-taking into account simultaneous pursuit of work-task progress. We collected daily diary data from 205 employees on 1399 days. Analyses showed that goal importance positively predicted health-behavior goal progress, which in turn positively predicted pride and negatively predicted shame at the end of the workday. The negative relation between health-behavior goal progress and shame was stronger on days with low work-task progress, implying compensatory effects. Work-task progress did not moderate the relation between health-behavior goal progress and pride. We discuss the theoretical and practical relevance of integrating research on multiple goal striving when promoting health behavior in daily work life by means of goal-striving techniques.

Academic Success at Social Costs: An Exploratory Study on Social Networks of Chinese Students under Academic Streaming

In universities that require students to reside in dormitories, there are two types of social networks-study/classroom-based and social/dorm room-based. The academic streaming system may disrupt study/classroom connections, but its impact on students' social networks is unknown. Using self-reported surveys, this study examines ego network measures of network sizes, turnover, multiplexity, and diversity among 382 students (44% female, 56% male). Surveys were administered before and after the university employed a first-semester grade-point average to demote or promote students into an honours college. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 11 honours students staying within their track and 11 students who were re-streamed to the non-honours track. Quantitative results showed that students in the non-honours college and who remained there had increasingly overlapping friendship circles between study and social environments, along with more diverse social connections, indicating stronger networks. In contrast, honours participants experienced fewer overlapping networks across domains and less dispersed social ties, especially after the academic replacement process. Qualitative results showed that the honours students faced a trade-off between academic success and social engagement in maintaining their elite status. Re-streamed students experienced otherness in social groups and decreased psychological wellbeing. This study contributes to the application of network analysis in education and provides insights into the unintended consequences of educational practice on students' social networks.

Unraveling the central and bridge psychological symptoms of people living with HIV: A network analysis

Background

People living with HIV (PLWH) experience multiple psychological symptoms. Few studies have provided information on central and bridge psychological symptoms among PLWH. This information has implications for improving the efficiency and efficacy of psychological interventions. Our study aimed to identify the central and bridge psychological symptoms of PLWH and to explore the interconnectedness among symptoms and clusters.

Methods

Our study used data from the HIV-related Symptoms Monitoring Survey, a multisite, cross-sectional study conducted during 2017-2021. We used R to visualize the network of 16 symptoms and analyzed the centrality and predictability indices of the network. We further analyzed the bridge symptoms among the three symptom clusters.

Results

A total of 3,985 participants were included in the analysis. The results suggested that sadness had the highest strength (r S = 9.69) and predictability (70.7%) compared to other symptoms. Based on the values of bridge strength, feeling unsafe (r bs = 0.94), uncontrollable worry (r bs = 0.82), and self-abasement (r bs = 0.81) were identified as bridge symptoms. We also found a strong correlation between sadness and self-abasement (r = 0.753) and self-loathing and self-blame (r = 0.744).

Conclusion

We found that sadness was the central psychological symptom of PLWH, indicating that sadness was the center of the psychological symptom network from a mechanistic perspective and could be a target for intervention. Deactivating bridge symptoms, including "feeling unsafe," "self-abasement," and "uncontrollable worry," could be more effective in preventing symptom activation from spreading (e.g., one symptom activating another).