With the development of digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI), numerous studies have focused on the applications and impacts of digital technology in the public sector. However, few studies have explored how frontline public service employees, the core subject of public organizations, can improve their proactive service performance. Based on the model of proactive motivation, this paper investigates the influence of digital leadership on employees' proactive service performance from a micro perspective, as well as the internal mechanisms and boundary conditions underlying this process. Through an analysis of three-wave questionnaire survey data from 234 employees, this study finds that digital leadership has a positive impact on public employees' proactive service performance through the serial mediation effects of AI service awareness and AI crafting. Furthermore, as an important boundary condition, employees' public service motivation strengthens the serial indirect effect of digital leadership on proactive service performance. This paper not only extends the literature on digital leadership by adopting a micro-level perspective within the context of public sector digital transformation but also identifies the individual and contextual antecedents of proactive service performance by examining the interactive effect of public service motivation and leadership. Furthermore, this paper offers valuable implications for the practice of digital transformation in public organizations.
Research on personality and behaviour has established that individuals exhibit relatively stable patterns of conduct across time, commonly described in terms of trait dimensions such as conscientiousness. At the same time, self-regulation and habit research have identified mechanisms involved in behavioural initiation, persistence, and automatization. Despite these advances, existing frameworks do not adequately specify the intermediate processes through which behavioural continuity is maintained across everyday contexts. This article introduces the concept of micro-discipline to address this gap. Micro-discipline refers to recurrent low-level acts of behavioural regulation that preserve continuity between intention and action under ordinary conditions of friction, including returning attention to a task, sustaining effort despite resistance, modulating minor impulses, and completing small obligations that might otherwise be deferred. The central claim is that these repeated regulatory acts constitute a distinct and temporally cumulative process through which behavioural patterns are stabilised and, over time, modified. Drawing on personality theory, self-regulation research, and related process-based approaches, the article develops a conceptual model explaining how such micro-regulatory processes bias the recurrence, persistence, and interruption of behavioural states, thereby contributing to trait stabilisation and trait change. By clarifying this intermediate process layer, the framework provides a more precise account of how local regulatory acts scale into durable patterns of behaviour. It further offers implications for understanding personality development, the maintenance of goal-directed behaviour, and the conditions under which intentional behavioural change succeeds or fails.
This study investigates how self-presentation and social skills relate to physical health among university students in Japan and Hong Kong, with particular attention to the mediating roles of social media use and social support. We conducted two online surveys; as a result, 452 participants in Japan and 289 participants in Hong Kong were analyzed using multi-group structural equation modeling. Across both samples, social skills were directly associated with increased physical symptoms, and this direct association was substantially stronger than the indirect association through social support, which was linked to fewer physical symptoms. Notable cross-cultural differences also emerged. In Japan, self-presentation was directly associated with increased respiratory-sleep symptoms (R-SSs), and this direct association was stronger than the indirect pathway through posting frequency and time spent on social media. In contrast, in Hong Kong, no direct association between self-presentation and physical symptoms was detected, although an indirect association through social media usage time-leading to increased R-SS-emerged at a marginally significant level. These findings highlight the dual and context-dependent effects of personal attributes in digital environments, demonstrating that characteristics typically associated with positive social functioning may produce unintended health consequences online. By integrating personal factors, social media behaviors, and cultural context, this study advances understanding of digital well-being and physical health in contemporary societies.
Parental burnout, characterized by emotional exhaustion and a sense of detachment, is a significant challenge for families of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While traditional research often focuses on socioeconomic status, this study examines how physical living conditions and household characteristics influence burnout levels in the Turkish context. A relational survey model was conducted with 131 parents of children with ASD. Data were collected via online surveys using a Sociodemographic Data Form and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which was adapted to the parenting role. Multiple linear regression analysis was applied to identify variables predicting total burnout scores. The analysis revealed that most sociodemographic variables, including income, education level, and parental age, did not significantly predict burnout. However, the “number of rooms in the house” was identified as the only statistically significant predictor (p = 0.033). Specifically, as the number of rooms increased, the total burnout scores of parents significantly decreased. The findings suggest that physical living space serves as a critical “spatial resource” and a protective factor against parental burnout. For families of children with ASD, having a private area for self-regulation is more decisive for mental health than economic status alone. Future support strategies should prioritize improving the quality of life through spatial arrangements and respite services.
Student mental health and academic stress are increasingly addressed through digital monitoring, yet evidence for personalized physiological thresholds based on exhaled VOCs, their in-the-wild feasibility, and their trigger-experience correspondence in everyday student life remains limited. This study examines whether exhaled breath signals can support personalized, real-world stress monitoring in university students using a two-stage design that moves from laboratory calibration to daily life validation. A total of 24 university students took part in the laboratory phase (Study 1; N = 24). Under two stress tasks, a social-conflict video task and a Stroop task, we derived an individualized breath-trigger threshold (θi) for each participant. We then invited 21 of them to join a three-day field deployment (Study 2; N = 21). Each participant's θi from Study 1 was used directly as the trigger threshold for daily monitoring in order to test the association between trigger events and subjectively noticeable emotional deviations and to assess preliminary trigger-experience correspondence in daily life. The results show that 78.6% of paired trigger-EMA records were rated as subjectively salient, with 93.9% of these rated at medium-to-high intensity. These events occurred most frequently during study/work activities (60.6%), in dorm/home settings (57.6%), and when participants were alone (63.6%), suggesting that the triggers captured personally meaningful emotional episodes embedded in routine academic life rather than random physiological fluctuations. Overall, this study presents a portable breath-based emotion sampling device for student academic contexts and a reproducible protocol that combines laboratory thresholding with daily life validation. The findings provide preliminary and exploratory indications of the feasibility and within-person transferability of VOC-based emotion detection in students, and offer methodological support for future digital emotion monitoring and intervention design based on breath signals.
This scoping review examined the current literature on routines and habits in individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). To our knowledge, research in this area remains limited. Therefore, this review mapped which areas of daily routines are most affected in children and adults with ADHD and explored related assessments and interventions. A comprehensive search was conducted across four databases: PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, and PsycINFO, using keywords including "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," "ADHD," "routine," "habit," and "lifestyle." The findings identified four main domains in which individuals with ADHD experience difficulties: sleep hygiene, feeding, physical activity, and sedentary behaviors, with sleep hygiene addressed in more than half of the included studies. Study habits were addressed in only one included study. Among the 31 included studies, six involved interventions. The review also found that no validated assessment was specifically designed to measure routines or habits in individuals with ADHD, and that broader measures of routines, habits, or lifestyle were often non-validated or developed for a single project. Overall, the existing studies were concentrated primarily in pediatric populations, with limited research involving adults. These findings highlight important gaps in the literature and underscore the need for more research on routines and habits in adults with ADHD. They also support the development of assessments and interventions that specifically address these areas.
While action video games (AVGs) can enhance cognitive control, mechanisms underlying gaming disorder (GD) remain unclear. Using the Dual Mechanisms of Control framework, two task-switching experiments dissociated proactive and reactive control among AVG players with GD, recreational game users (RGU), and non-gamers (NG). Experiment 1 provided initial evidence that, unlike healthy controls, GD players showed difficulty sustaining proactive preparation over extended intervals and tended to rely more on post-response interference resolution. Experiment 2 further supported this reactive dependence: after prolonged delays, switch costs in the GD group dropped to negligible levels, whereas residual costs persisted in RGU and NG groups. These findings provide converging evidence that GD players exhibit relatively fragile proactive control and a compensatory over-reliance on reactive control. Consequently, cognitive impairment in GD reflects a shift in processing mode rather than a generalized deficit, highlighting mechanism-specific targets for clinical interventions.
This study examines how German textbooks provide learning-behavioral affordances for sustainability-oriented intercultural competence development. Drawing on Klieme's competence-model logic, ESD, intercultural competence research, learning behavior theory, and affordance theory, it treats "sustainable intercultural competence" not as a standardized construct but as a working shorthand for the sustainability-oriented development of intercultural competence. Methodologically, the study adopts a directed qualitative content analysis supplemented by descriptive frequency aggregation. All 37 units across the four volumes of Meilenstein were coded on a 0-2 scale across three affordance dimensions: cognitive-understanding affordance, reflective value-judgment affordance, and interaction-action affordance. The findings show that the series provides substantial but uneven affordances. Interaction-action received the highest aggregated score, followed by cognitive-understanding, whereas reflective value-judgment remained substantially lower. Units on family, identity, sustainability, and civic engagement offer the most balanced affordance structures, whereas everyday practical units privilege communicative action and disciplinary units privilege cognitive understanding. The study argues that textbook-based intercultural learning should be examined not only through topic inclusion but also through how texts, prompts, and tasks organize opportunities for comparison, reflection, judgment, negotiation, and action.
This study examines trade-offs between organizational culture, measured by the Competing Values Framework, and high financial compensation among Romanian Generation Z (n = 584). Using a quantitative cross-sectional design and scenario-based choice experiments, binary logistic regression models assessed how culture preferences and demographics predict employer choice. Results show that preferences for Clan culture most consistently increased the likelihood of selecting a culturally defined employer over high-salary alternatives (odds ratios 1.08-1.15), particularly through mentoring and employee development. Notably, Hierarchy culture preferences also significantly influenced decisions, indicating that this generation values both support and structured predictability. Employment status strongly moderated these trade-offs, with employed respondents significantly more likely to prioritize cultural attributes (odds ratios 2.07-2.47). Findings indicate that Generation Z makes nuanced, context-sensitive trade-offs, challenging one-dimensional assumptions about their motivations. These findings provide context-specific insights into Romanian Generation Z employer choice and offer practical implications for employer branding and talent attraction strategies.
Within the conceptual framework of the Unified Flexibility & Mindfulness (UFM) model, the current study applied a contextual behavioral science lens to understanding the challenges and dynamics of classroom teaching in the United States. In particular, the study sought to highlight the specific flexibility processes linked to lower teacher burnout and to greater use of adaptive instructional and behavior management strategies—deepening the conceptualization and operationalization of teachers’ Social and Emotional Competence (SEC). Toward that end, a sample of 308 K-12 teachers (79% female, 85% white, Mage = 42 years old) with an average of 13 years of teaching experience completed a relational task (RT) indirectly assessing relational thinking about students along with teacher-report measures of: (1) their own use of 14 forms of mindful flexibility (and distracted, reactive inflexibility) in the classroom, (2) their conscious perceptions of student engagement and disaffection with learning, (3) their use of adaptive instructional and behavior management strategies, and (4) a measure of work-related and student-related burnout. Exploratory network analyses largely supported the Unified Flexibility and Mindfulness model shaping teachers’ functioning in the classroom. The results further highlighted unique links from categorical thinking on the RT (i.e., viewing all positive or negative adjectives as essentially the same in students) to greater burnout and unique links from more nuanced thinking on the RT (i.e., the ability to see negative and positive traits coexisting in students) to greater perceptions of both student engagement and disaffection. Teachers’ engagement of committed action and self-as-context (maintaining a broader perspective in the face of disruptive behavior) along with perceptions of greater student engagement emerged as some of the most robust predictors of using adaptive classroom strategies. In contrast, teachers’ engagement in fusion and inaction (along with perceptions of greater student disaffection and lower student engagement) emerged as the most robust predictors of teacher burnout. Implications are discussed.
This study (N = 249) examines the influence of cognitive reflection on rational decision making in tasks that require the-potentially rapid-integration of multiple pieces of information but are not designed such that intuitive (System 1) responses mislead people. Cognitive reflection was measured using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). Choice behavior was analyzed in 250 probabilistic inference tasks and 16 risky-decision tasks completed by each participant. In both tasks, individuals with higher CRT scores made more rational choices. This superior performance was not attributable to qualitative differences in cognitive processes. For individuals low and high in cognitive reflection, the same Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Model best explained their choice behavior. High-reflective individuals appeared to use the same coherence-based processes more efficiently and consistently. The absence of qualitative process differences across individuals varying in their tendency to engage in deliberate processing supports an integrative account of dual-process models, particularly those grounded in interactive activation frameworks.
Previous studies have shown that, after postoperative recovery from upper and lower gastrointestinal surgery for cancer, patients use peculiar modalities to describe their health. The purpose of this study is to determine how upper and lower gastrointestinal cancer surgery is considered by patients when they set their health. A structured interview was developed and 47 consecutive patients were interviewed postoperatively. Answers were analyzed through M.A.D.I.T., a quantitative and qualitative methodology that allows for the detection of discursive processes comprising the text, beyond thematic analysis. Four dimensions have been analyzed: representation of the postoperative period in daily life; use of resources; participation in achieving the clinical objective after hospital discharge; and continuing to respect the surgeons' indications. A corpus of 2374 text occurrences was analyzed. Without differences between types of surgery, surgical patients described the time after surgical intervention as a critical scenario. Patients expressed their personal opinions, expecting normality after surgery and having difficulty envisioning the future: their representation of inflexibility in the postoperative period prevented them from finding new coping strategies. Overall, across all four dimensions, participants used stabilization discursive modalities in more than 50% of cases, representative of a situation bound within strict ties and personal theories. When defining their health, cancer surgery patients tend not to consider their condition as a new and different one from before; they imagine that they will be able to fully resume their previous habits. However, this can risk undermining the achievement of the clinical objective. Thus, during early surgical consultations, as well as in surgical recovery, exploring differences after surgery and solutions could help patients in their engagement with surgical outcomes and consequences.
Executive functions (EFs) are key cognitive processes for behaviour. However, there is little information about interaction with the dimensions of health-related quality of life (HRQoL), therefore the objective of this study was to analyse the association between lifestyle habits (physical activity and screen time), sleep, HRQoL and EFs in children and adolescents. Specifically, this study aimed to identify the extent to which perceived well-being dimensions are associated with EFs and to determine the potential mediating role of HRQoL in the relationships between lifestyle habits and these cognitive domains, examining whether these direct and indirect pathways remain robust after adjusting for gender and age. A total of 943 children and adolescents (51.3% female) aged 10-17 years participated. Lifestyle parameters (PA Krece Plus, sleep duration and KIDSCREEN-10 questionnaire) and EFs (CogniFit neurocognitive assessment battery) were evaluated. The analysis of the individual KIDSCREEN-10 items revealed that perception of school performance presented the most consistent association with EFs, being positively related to attention (b = 16.39, p = 0.018), cognitive flexibility (b = 30.65, p = 0.005), inhibition (b = 24.66, p = 0.022), and working Memory (b = 42.33, p < 0.001). Furthermore, parental fairness reported a significant association for three out of four domains: attention (b = 13.89, p = 0.006), flexibility (b = 22.93, p = 0.003), and working Memory (b = 25.42, p < 0.001). Having enough time for self was also significantly related to attention performance (b = 12.60, p = 0.026). Regarding lifestyle habits, the composite lifestyle index (PA + ST) showed the most consistent positive association across all cognitive domains, while sleep duration was inversely associated with attention, cognitive flexibility, and working Memory. The mediation analysis revealed that global HRQoL significantly mediated the relationship between lifestyle habits and executive functions, accounting for 9.55% of the total effect on attention, 5.45% on cognitive flexibility, and 4.14% on working memory, whereas no mediation was observed for inhibition. In conclusion personal time, parental fairness, and school adjustment were positively associated with EFs. HRQoL and physical activity levels also showed consistent links with all EFs, whereas sleep duration was inversely related. Furthermore, mediation analysis revealed that global HRQoL acts as a critical indirect pathway, explaining a significant proportion of the lifestyle habits' total effect on attention, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Overall, these findings highlight the multifactorial and interrelated mechanisms shaping executive functioning in children and adolescents.
This study aimed to develop and validate a Social-Emotional Competence instrument for college students. The questionnaire includes 30 items across five dimensions: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, interpersonal communication, and sense of responsibility. The items were selected from an initial pool of 42 items generated through a comprehensive literature review, semi-structured interviews, and expert evaluation. A total of 1008 valid responses were collected from undergraduate students. The dataset was randomly divided into two independent samples. Sample 1 (n = 504) was used for item analysis and exploratory factor analysis, while Sample 2 (n = 504) was employed for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and assessing the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis supported a five-factor structure, accounting for 60.619% of the total variance. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the model fit the data reasonably well, with CFI = 0.915, TLI = 0.905, RMSEA = 0.063, and SRMR = 0.046. The questionnaire demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α = 0.958) and maintained strong stability over time, as evidenced by a test-retest correlation of r = 0.939. Criterion-related validity was supported by significant positive correlations with interpersonal competence and negative correlations with emotion regulation difficulties and depressive symptoms. Taken together, these results provide preliminary support for the reliability and validity of the instrument, suggesting that it may serve as a practical tool for evaluating social-emotional competence among college students.
Academic stress is widely related to student engagement, yet its multidimensional nature and underlying processes remain insufficiently examined in laboratory learning contexts. This study explored the relationship between different sources of academic stress and academic engagement in chemistry laboratory courses, with learning burnout as a potential mediator. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1647 undergraduate school students. Academic stress was conceptualized as three dimensions: students’ academic self-perceptions (SP), faculty work and examinations (WE), and academic expectations (AExp). The results showed that these stress dimensions were differentially related to academic engagement. In addition, learning burnout was found to be associated with the relationship between academic stress and engagement, suggesting a mediating role. Notably, workload-related stress was more strongly related to engagement, whereas expectation-related stress showed a stronger association with burnout. These findings suggest that academic stress is not a unitary construct and that different stress sources may be associated with engagement through distinct patterns. The results provide a basis for understanding how stress operates in laboratory learning contexts and offer implications for both research and instructional practice.
Drawing on moral cleansing theory, this study adopts an actor-centered perspective to examine how ingratiation relates to employees’ moral rumination and subsequent coworker-directed cooperative behavior, thereby offering insights to help organizations to understand and guide such behaviors. Using a multi-wave survey design, this study collected data from 272 employees to examine a theoretical model investigating how employee ingratiation influences coworker-directed cooperative behavior through moral rumination, while also examining the moderating role of employee moral identity. The results indicate that employee ingratiation positively influences moral rumination, which in turn enhances coworker-directed cooperative behavior. Furthermore, the indirect effect of ingratiation on coworker-directed cooperative behavior via moral rumination is strengthened among employees with high moral identity. This study advances the literature by shifting the focus from targets and observers to actors themselves, examining how ingratiation shapes actors’ own moral perception and subsequent behavior. It further contributes by introducing moral rumination as a mediating mechanism and exploring the moderating effect of moral identity, as well as offering new insights into ingratiation in organizational contexts.
Adolescents with LGBTQ+ parents and LGBTQ+ adolescents navigate unique social and identity-related challenges as compared to those without minoritized sexual and/or gender identities. Adolescents with LGBTQ+ parents (regardless of their own sexual or gender identity) and adolescents who personally identify as LGBTQ+ are distinct populations, though they sometimes overlap. Research on adolescents with LGBTQ+ parents has often focused on parent-adolescent relationships and family structures. How do friends help youth cope with identity-based minority stressors, like peer microaggressions, bullying, and exclusion, common for those with minoritized identities? Friendships are developmentally pivotal during adolescence, shaping social competence, identity exploration, and psychological adjustment. Grounded in ecological systems, social learning, and minority stress theories, we sought to understand how friendships relate to mental health and coping in adolescents with LGBTQ+ parents. This cross-sectional quantitative study included 98 adolescents (ages 12-19) with LGBTQ+ parents in the U.S., recruited via community sampling and Prolific. Higher-quality peer attachment, conceptualized by trust, communication, and alienation in close friendships, was associated with lower depression and greater social competence, but not associated with anxiety or adaptive coping (after accounting for avoidant coping). Avoidant coping was most strongly associated with poorer mental health. This study, with implications for practice, emphasizes the importance of peer relationships for adolescents with LGBTQ+ parents-particularly how high-quality friendships offer important possible protection via social competence and against depression-while also highlighting the complex interplay between friendships, coping, and adjustment.
Previous research suggests receiving a concurrent auditory version of text during reading, i.e., reading-while-listening, improves eye-movement behavior in less skilled readers, while disrupting skilled reading. We extended this approach to older adults (65+ years) to see whether they benefit similarly. The experiment was conducted in Chinese, comparing young and older adults from an earlier reading-only study with new, closely matched groups presented with the same stimuli in a reading-while-listening task. Stimuli comprised either sentences containing a temporary ambiguity or matched unambiguous control, with plausibility manipulated for control target words and the incorrect interpretation of the ambiguity. At the sentence level, older adults showed differences across reading modes, with faster reading during reading-while-listening, whereas younger adults showed no evidence that reading-while-listening benefited reading, with some evidence it was disruptive. At the word level, both groups produced control-word plausibility effects, but neither showed plausibility effects for ambiguous targets, with no influence of reading mode. The findings suggest differential effects of reading-while-listening, potentially facilitating reading in older adults while yielding no benefit and some disruption in younger adults. As neither group had difficulty processing the ambiguity, no conclusions can be drawn about local ambiguity resolution. Nevertheless, the results suggest possible benefits of reading-while-listening for older adults.
Self-silencing, the suppression of self-expression to preserve relationships, has been theorised as context-dependent, yet research has examined this construct primarily at the between-group level, leaving within-person variation underexplored. This qualitative study examined how self-silencing varies across relationship domains among 53 young adults (30 women, 23 men) at international universities in Thailand, using semi-structured interviews (n = 10) and written reflections (n = 43) analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. Findings showed that self-silencing was relationship-specific: participants distinguished relationships in which they expressed themselves from those in which they did not, with perceived security as the most consistent distinction. This pattern operated independently of family socialisation: supportive later relationships could undo learned silence, and fragile ones could introduce silence in participants from expressive families. Thai cultural values of kreng jai and jai yen gave participants a vocabulary for silence but did not dictate where it occurred. The meaning of self-silencing differed by gender, with women more clearly framing silence as care and men as emotional control. Self-silencing carried cumulative psychological costs and took varied behavioural forms. These findings suggest that self-silencing operates as a relationship-specific process rather than a stable personal characteristic.
This study used a Cross-Lagged Panel Network model to examine prospective longitudinal associations among dimensions of adolescent mental health and differences in these associations across gender and grade levels. A total of 3610 Chinese adolescents completed the Middle School Student Mental Health Scale at two time points, with an interval of approximately six months between assessments. In the overall network, interpersonal sensitivity had the strongest out-expected influence, indicating the strongest outgoing predictive associations with other mental health dimensions. Depression ranked second and showed a significant bidirectional prospective association with interpersonal sensitivity. Emotional instability had the strongest in-expected influence, suggesting that it was the dimension most strongly predicted by other domains. Subgroup analyses revealed that interpersonal sensitivity showed the strongest outgoing predictive associations in the male network, whereas depression played this role in the female network. In the junior high school network, depression showed the strongest outgoing predictive associations, whereas interpersonal sensitivity was the most central predictive domain in the senior high school network. These findings may inform gender- and grade-sensitive screening and monitoring strategies and provide preliminary evidence for future intervention research.
