Lei Han

Parental educational anxiety, a phenomenon stemming from the highly competitive landscape of Chinese education, has been linked to adolescents’ learning weariness, which describes students’ overall negative reactions to academic pursuits and may be influenced by such anxiety. While prior research has predominantly explored the one-way impact of parental factors on adolescent academic development, the reciprocal dynamics between these elements have received less attention. To address this gap, the current study developed three competing models to investigate the relationships among educational anxiety, academic self-efficacy, and learning weariness. The study involved 266 early adolescents (44.4% female; M _age = 11.96 years, SD = 0.83) and one of their parents (78.9% mothers; M _age = 38.97 years, SD = 4.74), who participated in two rounds of surveys conducted one year apart. The findings from the half-longitudinal mediation analysis indicated that (1) no direct unidirectional or bidirectional association between educational anxiety and learning weariness was detected, and (2) in the retained parent-effect model, educational anxiety was prospectively associated with learning weariness via academic self-efficacy, although this indirect association was small and statistically fragile across model specifications. The reverse pathways were not statistically detected in the current sample, but low statistical power precluded definitive conclusions about directionality. These results suggest that the parent-effect model provides the most parsimonious account of a fragile but consistently positive indirect association from parental educational anxiety to adolescents’ learning weariness via academic self-efficacy, and offer empirical insights to inform future research and intervention development aimed at alleviating learning weariness and enhancing the quality of family education.

Background: In multimedia learning environments, pedagogical agents have emerged as an innovative tool to enhance digital instruction, yet optimising their design for maximal learning effectiveness remains underexplored.Objectives: This study aimed to investigate how specific design elements of pedagogical agents, namely appearance and voice type, affect multimedia learning performance.Methods: A 2 (appearance: formal vs. informal) × 2 (voice type: human vs. engine‐generated voice) between‐subjects design was employed, incorporating eye‐tracking technology. A total of 115 participants completed a multimedia learning module on chemical synaptic transmission. Learning outcomes were assessed using retention and transfer tests. Learner perceptions were measured across five indicators: social perception, perceived difficulty, lecture engagement, situational interest, and cognitive load.Results and Conclusions: Pedagogical agents with a formal appearance positively influenced learning outcomes, increasing fixation duration and fixation count, while reducing perceived material difficulty and intrinsic load. Agents with human voices similarly enhanced learning outcomes, increasing fixation counts, social perception, lecture engagement, and situational interest, while reducing perception difficulty, intrinsic load and extraneous load. The combination of a human voice and formal appearance produced the greatest benefits in learning performance. Meanwhile, compared to the combination of informal appearance and engine‐generated voice, the formal appearance with a human voice indirectly affected learning outcomes by reducing perceived difficulty, intrinsic load and extraneous load. It also indirectly increased fixation count through enhanced social perception, lecture engagement and situational interest. These findings advance our understanding of the role of pedagogical agents in multimedia learning and offer valuable insights for designing effective instructional tools that maximise engagement and learning outcomes.

Part-set cuing facilitation and impairment effects are rarely found in spatial memory, which is a challenge to the theories of part-set cuing effects based on lexical stimulus. This study aims to investigate whether there part-set cuing facilitation and impairment effects are present in spatial memory by constructing two types of memory scenes with high and low degrees of interitem associations, achieved by manipulating the presentation of miniatures. This study examined the effects of different part-set cues on free recall, recognition, and reconstruction tasks. The results of two experiments revealed that matrix cues impaired the performance of three recall tasks in memory scenes with a high degree of interitem associations, and scene cues facilitated the reconstruction performance (Experiment 1). Conversely, in memory scenes with a low degree of interitem associations, the impairment effect of matrix cues was not observed in the three recall tasks, but scene cues still facilitated the reconstruction performance (Experiment 2). These findings supported the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis, the two-mechanism and the multi-mechanism accounts, demonstrating the significance of interitem associations in spatial memory. Furthermore, the results provided direct evidence for the importance of the encoding-retrieval strategy matching principle in spatial memory tasks.

Social comparison is a universal social phenomenon that profoundly influences aggressive behaviours among young adults. Based on the general aggression model, this study investigated the relationship between social comparison and aggression, and the mediating role of relative deprivation. To further explore the mechanism underlying this influence, covert narcissism was examined as a moderator in this relationship, based on relative deprivation theory. The results from the current study using a total of 726 Chinese college students showed that social comparison was positively correlated with aggression, which was mediated by relative deprivation. Specifically, more frequent social comparison was associated with higher relative deprivation, which was, in turn, associated with higher aggression. Covert narcissism acted as a moderator in this model. Covert narcissism exacerbated the relationships between social comparison and relative deprivation and relative deprivation and aggression. Specifically, compared to individuals with low levels of covert narcissism, those with high levels of covert narcissism exhibited greater relative deprivation when subjected to the same social comparisons, subsequently displaying increased levels of aggression. This study deepens the understanding of the relationship between social comparison and aggression and provides an intervention direction and a theoretical basis for effectively preventing aggression in young adults.