Search Results (8,230)

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased adolescent digital engagement, but whether the rise in cyberbullying persists beyond the crisis is not well understood, especially in Southeast Asia. This study examined social media addiction, perceived stress, emotional intelligence, and cyberbullying among 416 Thai secondary students (grades 7–12) during the pandemic-to-endemic transition (June–October 2023). Participants completed validated Thai-language instruments assessing cyberbullying, social media addiction, perceived stress, and emotional intelligence. Results showed 66.4% of adolescents were involved in cyberbullying, with 32.2% as bully-victims. Social media addiction correlated with cyberbullying perpetration (r_s = 0.33, p < 0.001) and victimization (r_s = 0.22, p < 0.001), as did perceived stress (r_s = 0.20 and 0.29; p < 0.001). Emotional intelligence showed negative correlations with cyberbullying perpetration (r_s = −0.15, p = 0.002) and victimization (r_s = −0.10, p = 0.048). Over one-third (34.4%) were at high risk for social media addiction. These findings indicate that during the pandemic-to-endemic transition, Thai adolescents showed elevated cyberbullying involvement, high social media addiction, and moderate-to-high stress—a profile consistent with sustained digital risk. These results highlight the need for integrated interventions that address digital wellness, stress management, and the development of emotional intelligence among Thai adolescents. Full article

Blue space, as an important natural and social composite feature system in cities, not only provides supporting, regulating, and provisioning services, but also plays a key role in human well-being, recreational experience, and urban sustainable development. The blue space cultural ecosystem service (CES) has gradually attracted the attention of academia in recent years, but there is a lack of systematic integration research in related fields. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive analysis of current studies to clarify how, and to what extent, blue spaces influence CESs. This study adopts a PRISMA-based systematic search combined with qualitative synthesis, aiming to review the research status of CES and its developmental trajectory within blue space studies, and to identify future research trends and critical gaps. A total of 52 studies meeting the inclusion criteria were finally selected through database screening. The research innovatively divides the evolution of blue space CES into three stages (2012–2017/2018–2022/2023–2025), revealing a shift in research focus from single value identification to complex policy support. Secondly, through the mapping of six typical blue space types (such as rivers and wetlands) and 10 CES indicators, combined with a Pearson correlation heatmap, it provides quantitative insights into the coupling mechanisms between indicators, such as the significant synergy between spiritual and educational values. Methodologically, it systematically discriminates between the application boundaries of monetary valuation based on the contingent valuation method and non-monetary valuation represented by social media big data and PPGIS, pointing out that technological progress is driving the evaluation toward high dynamics and refinement. Finally, the study points out current bottlenecks such as uneven geographical distribution and insufficient planning transformation, emphasizing that future research should use artificial intelligence to improve data processing accuracy and transform blue space CESs from “invisible welfare” into “explicit policy assets” to guide sustainable urban renewal and healthy space design. Full article

This study examined how perceived social media affordances, self-presentation, and online engagement collectively shape experiences of social validation among Nigerian youths within an integrated framework that combines Affordance theory, Goffman’s Dramaturgical perspectives, and Uses and Gratifications. Using a quantitative survey of 480 active social media users across platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X), data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, regression, and regression-based sequential mediation modelling. Our findings indicate that perceived social media affordances significantly predict self-presentation behaviours (β = 0.79, p < 0.001), self-presentation significantly predicts online engagement (β = 0.43, p < 0.001); and online engagement predicts perceived social validation (β = 051, p < 0.001). Our findings also reveal that self-presentation and online engagement jointly and sequentially mediate the relationship between perceived affordances and perceived social media validation, with a significant indirect effect (β = 0.13, 95% CI [0.09, 0.19]) and a non-significant direct path from affordances to validation. Within a connectivity-constrained environment of Nigerian youths, our findings support a process-based understanding of digital interaction, showing how technological affordances are translated into social outcomes via structured, theoretically grounded user practices. Apart from validation emerging as a salient gratification, the study noted other motivational cues (sociability, identity expression, and information seeking) behind youth engagement with social media, suggesting that validation is just one of many reasons underlying youth social media use. The study contributes to Global Majority Media scholarship by providing a theoretically integrated process-based framework and a mechanism-oriented narrative of social media use in a non-Western setting. Full article

Background/Objectives: The increasing prevalence of digital media use among children and adolescents has raised concerns regarding its potential impact on cognitive and communication development. Previous research has linked higher screen exposure to poorer language outcomes; however, the mechanisms underlying these associations remain insufficiently understood, particularly with respect to pragmatic communication. The present study aimed to examine the relationships between daily screen time, executive functioning (EF), and communication-related outcomes, and to test whether EF mediates the association between digital media exposure and pragmatic communication and language performance. Methods: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted with 240 children and adolescents aged 6–15 years. Caregivers reported children’s daily screen time, digital consumption and communication skills. EF was assessed using performance-based tasks measuring inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Language performance was evaluated using a standardized composite measure. Pearson correlations, mediation analyses with bootstrapped confidence intervals, and factorial analyses of variance were performed, controlling for age, sex, parental mediation, and educational content exposure. Results: Higher daily screen time was significantly associated with lower EF, weaker pragmatic communication, and poorer language performance. EF was positively related to both pragmatic and language outcomes and partially mediated the relationship between screen time and communication measures. Educational digital content and parental mediation showed positive associations with EF and communication outcomes, whereas recreational content exhibited negative associations. Group comparisons indicated that negative associations between screen exposure and developmental outcomes were more pronounced in younger children. Conclusions: These findings suggest that EF may represent a key intermediary mechanism underlying the association between digital media exposure and communication-related development. The results highlight the importance of considering not only the quantity but also the quality and context of children’s digital media use, particularly during early developmental stages. Full article

Social media platforms have become critical infrastructures for customer relationship management (CRM), requiring scalable and intelligent solutions to handle high-volume interactions. In the luxury fragrance sector, digital promotion poses a unique challenge because olfactory attributes cannot be experienced online. As a result, physical fragrance samples remain essential, generating large volumes of sample requests or inquiries across social media. However, many requests remain unmanaged due to limitations in manual CRM (i.e., human-driven processes), revealing a design gap that may negatively affect perceived responsiveness and service quality. This study uses qualitative content analysis with NVivo 12 to examine large-scale sample request interactions on the Facebook pages of four luxury fragrance brands. Data was collected via NCapture and analyzed to identify recurring patterns, linguistic structures, and customer expressions related to sample requests. Findings confirm frequent repetitive requests, highlighting inefficiencies in traditional CRM systems under high demand. This research proposes an AI-driven CRM Sample Request Management Architecture (CRM–SRMA) that systematically captures and processes customer sample requests, collects the necessary mailing information, and seamlessly transfers validated data to the final dispatching stage. The proposed system also models individual fragrance preferences by analyzing customers’ interactions with samples, particularly in terms of top, middle, and base notes. By leveraging this information, the architecture enables the targeted promotion of new fragrance releases that closely align with customers’ demonstrated olfactory preferences. The insights of this research provide a scalable, intelligent mechanism that enables luxury social media managers and CRM systems to manage high-volume interactions while maintaining service quality. By automating sample request processing, the mechanism improves responsiveness and reduces operational burden. It also supports long-term relationship building through preference tracking and updating customers with any new relevant-fragrance releases. Although focused on fragrances, the mechanism is adaptable to other luxury cosmetic categories, thereby ideally enhancing overall social media-based customer service. Full article

This article examines the assumed dichotomy between the Black church and the juke joint within African American cultural discourse. Often portrayed as moral opposites—one sacred and the other secular—this study argues that such a binary reflects a Eurocentric interpretive framework rather than the actual historical realities of Black communal life. Through cultural and historical analysis, the article asserts that both institutions originated from similar conditions of racial exclusion and served as complementary spaces that nurtured African American identity, resilience, and community connections. Using the film Sinners as a key cultural text, the study explores how contemporary media narratives complicate rigid distinctions between sacred and secular Black spaces, identities, music, and spirituality. The character Sammie illustrates the permeability between these spaces, embodying a cultural logic where spiritual refuge and expressive release coexist. The analysis places this view within the African philosophical concept of Ubuntu, which emphasizes relational identity and the inseparability and oneness of the Black community. Drawing on the scholarship of James H. Cone, the article also shows that spirituals and blues share roots in African diasporic musical traditions. These traditions demonstrate the deep interconnection between religious and secular forms of Black expression. Ultimately, the study concludes that the Black church and the juke joint should be understood not as opposing institutions but as interconnected cultural spaces that collectively sustain African American spiritual, social, and artistic life. Full article

This study examines the effects of a three-month pedagogical intervention that integrated artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and web-based tools to strengthen digital literacy, creativity, and cultural participation among secondary education students in Ecuador. The intervention was theoretically grounded in perspectives of inclusive digital education and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), emphasizing participation, accessibility, and collaborative knowledge construction. The intervention involved 61 students supported by 31 university facilitators and was developed under a mixed-methods action research design with a pre–post (quasi-experimental) approach. Pre- and post-test surveys were administered to assess changes in digital competencies and creativity, while semi-structured interviews explored students’ perceptions of creative expression and their engagement with the cultural and technological ecosystem. Quantitative results showed statistically significant improvements in digital literacy and creativity (p < 0.001), while qualitative findings evidenced increased student empowerment, critical awareness of algorithms, and active cultural participation. The integration of AI and social media promoted an inclusive, student-centered learning environment that enhanced autonomy, reflective thinking, and media engagement. These results suggest that hybrid and culturally contextualized AI-mediated interventions may foster 21st-century competencies, strengthen digital equity, and promote creative agency in educational contexts of the Global South, particularly within emerging digital learning environments in Ecuador. Full article

Influencer marketing research has shown that source-related evaluations matter, yet less is known about how specific influencer cues are translated into consumer responses through differentiated internal psychological states. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) framework, this study examines how influencer attractiveness and expertise shape consumer responses through parasocial interaction and trust. Attractiveness is conceptualized as a social-affective cue, whereas expertise is conceptualized as a competence-based cue. Parasocial interaction is modeled as a relational organismic state, and trust is modeled as a reliance-oriented organismic state. Survey data were collected from 532 Taiwanese social media users with prior experience following influencers and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results show that attractiveness positively predicts parasocial interaction, expertise positively predicts trust, and parasocial interaction further contributes to trust. Trust, in turn, positively influences loyalty, purchase intention, and recommendation intention, with the strongest effect observed for recommendation intention. These findings suggest that influencer effectiveness is better understood as a differentiated cue–mechanism–response process rather than as a generalized source-evaluation effect. By distinguishing attractiveness from expertise and by modeling parasocial interaction and trust as conceptually distinct but sequentially connected organismic states, this study provides a more precise S-O-R account of how influencer evaluations are translated into relational, transactional, and advocacy-oriented consumer responses. Full article

The sustainability of information poses an ever-greater challenge in the digital age, particularly within local media ecosystems, where access to technology does not necessarily lead to informed participation or stronger ties with institutions. In contexts such as Ecuador, persistent inequalities shape the way people access, use and trust information, reinforcing complex forms of the digital divide. This study analyses how the sustainability of information is reflected in media consumption patterns and levels of institutional engagement within a regional context. Based on a survey of 1784 people in the province of Imbabura, the study applies a combined approach using cluster analysis and random forest models to identify distinct audience profiles. The results reveal four distinct groups, demonstrating that the intensity and diversity of media use are more relevant than mere digital access. High levels of digital use do not guarantee greater institutional engagement; instead, hybrid patterns emerge that combine traditional, digital and institutional media in different ways. The findings show that digital access alone is not sufficient to ensure information sustainability or the formation of institutional opinion. From a public policy perspective, universities and public institutions should promote digital literacy, build trust and design more targeted communication strategies to reduce information inequalities and foster informed participation. Full article

Background/Objectives: Cancer-related terminology is not merely descriptive and plays a critical role in shaping emotional responses, personal identity, and communication across clinical, social, and public spheres. Despite growing interest in the psychosocial dimensions of illness language, few studies have centered the lived experiences of individuals navigating cancer through the lens of terminology. This study explores how people living with and beyond cancer perceive, interpret, and emotionally respond to cancer-related language, focusing on the way terminology influences identity, stigma, and communicative interaction. Methods: A sequential mixed-methods design was employed. The quantitative phase involved 146 participants with a cancer diagnosis completing a structured questionnaire on preferred terminology and emotional impact. The qualitative phase followed, using open-ended questionnaires with 11 participants to deepen understanding of linguistic experiences. Thematic content analysis was used to identify patterns across narratives. Results: These findings reveal that labels such as “cancer patient” evoke strong negative emotional reactions, associated with stigma, fear, and identity reduction. Person-first and context-sensitive language was perceived as more respectful and empowering. Emotional responses to language varied widely, from fear to neutrality, shaped by speaker role, context, and time since diagnosis. Media representations were often seen as dramatizing or moralizing, reinforcing the need for communicative clarity, empathy, and education in both clinical and public discourse. Conclusions: Cancer-related language is a powerful psychosocial force. It shapes how individuals are seen and see themselves and can either reinforce stigma or foster dignity and resilience. This study highlights the urgent need for person-centered, context-aware communication practices across healthcare, media, and society. Full article

Social media platforms have become critical communication environments during disasters, where individuals express emotions, share information, and engage in public discourse. These platforms also reflect heterogeneous communication patterns shaped by different actor groups. However, existing studies predominantly focus on emotion classification and often overlook the combined role of actor identity and conflict dynamics. To address this gap, this study proposes an integrated AI-based analytical framework for actor-aware emotion and conflict analysis in post-disaster social media. An expert-annotated Turkish tweet dataset was constructed based on Ekman’s emotion model, including anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and surprise, along with an additional irrelevant/off-topic category and conflict-level labels. A Transformer-based model (BERTurk) was fine-tuned for multi-class emotion classification. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves strong classification performance, with an accuracy of 0.931 and an F1-score of 0.912, outperforming conventional machine learning and deep learning baselines. Actor-based analysis reveals systematic differences in emotional and conflict patterns across groups. Scientists, journalists, and individual users exhibit higher levels of conflict and more pronounced negative emotional expressions, whereas institutionally oriented actors display comparatively balanced and supportive communication patterns. In addition, a web-based decision support system was developed to enable interactive visualization and actor-level exploration of emotional and conflict dynamics. Overall, the proposed framework provides a scalable, analytically robust approach to understanding social media discourse in disaster contexts and offers practical implications for AI-driven crisis communication and decision-support systems. Full article

Virtual vitality has become an important complementary dimension for describing urban vitality; however, the identification and formation mechanisms of its stable, high-vitality state during dynamic change remain insufficiently explored. Taking five urban districts of Harbin as the study area, this study uses TikTok short-video data from July to August 2024 (summer) and December 2024 to January 2025 (winter), together with Gaode Map POI data, as the core dataset. Kernel density differences between adjacent weeks are used to measure the dynamic changes in virtual vitality. Bivariate local spatial autocorrelation is applied to identify high-vitality stable zones, and a Random Forest model is employed to examine the nonlinear influence of physical vitality spatial structures. The results show the following: (1) Dynamic change patterns of virtual vitality differ significantly across seasons, and when online attention content points to specific physical spatial structures, a stable high-vitality state is more likely to be maintained. (2) Bivariate local spatial autocorrelation analysis indicates that high-vitality stable zones (HH zones) exhibit significant spatial clustering, with vitality-enhancing zones (LH zones) distributed around them and showing spillover effects, while vitality-declining zones (HL zones) are more scattered. (3) The Random Forest results show that the stable maintenance of high virtual vitality depends more on combinations of spatial structural characteristics with high recognizability, among which distance to activity center (tourism), functional composition dissimilarity (culture), and functional composition dissimilarity (shopping) have the strongest influence. These findings reveal a nonlinear relationship between the stable high-vitality state and the structure of physical vitality space, providing insights for guiding online attention to support physical spatial development. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic had a global impact on students transitioning into higher education. During quarantine measures, students often turned to social media for connectedness and peer support in an adverse time. The aim of this research was to explore the perceived impact of social media use during COVID-19 on the psychological resilience of students transitioning into higher education. Data were collected via a qualitative online survey completed by 51 students across the United Kingdom. Following a reflexive thematic analysis of the survey data, three themes were generated: (1) A challenging transition: restricted visits, remote learning, and seeking connection. (2) Facing adversity: becoming resilient in a transitional period. (3) A valued resource: social media as a facilitator of resilience. The findings suggest that social media helped students build virtual connections to overcome feelings of isolation during this transition. Several participants perceived their psychological resilience to have increased through developing strategies to regulate their emotional and mental well-being. Nonetheless, some participants believed that their psychological resilience either decreased or remained untouched. Furthermore, it was explicitly argued that social media played a facilitating role in enhancing participants’ perceived psychological resilience through operating as a ‘coping mechanism’, which fostered a sense of community and togetherness amongst like-minded students. Full article

Based on Weibo big data, BERTopic, and dual-channel sentiment analysis model, a dynamic analysis framework of public perception and emotion evolution is constructed from the perspective of disaster chain and public response. The results show that (1) Due to the trust of information sources by the public, the efficiency of early warning information reaching the public and attracting attention is relatively high. Social media activity on related topics peaked several times in response to reports of major hazards, such as railway suspensions, passengers trapped in trains, and severe flooding in Miyun District, Beijing. (2) The evolution of topics of public attention strongly corresponds to the disaster process: From early warning and emergency risk avoidance, gradually move to disaster report and rescue coordination, and finally focus on the criticism of infrastructure vulnerability. (3) The emotional response presents phased characteristics. At the initial stage of the rainstorm red warning issued by the meteorological department, anxiety is dominant; after the release of rescue information, emotion rises briefly, and reflection and attribution tendencies generally appear after the disaster. (4) Elderly populations and those in remote areas exhibit characteristics of vulnerability, information isolation, and high dependency in response to disasters. Full article

The study examines the impact of Work Social Media Usage (WSMU) on employee skills through the mediating roles of perceived relatedness, perceived autonomy, and perceived competence. A comprehensive questionnaire was formulated to measure WSMU and employee skills, based on self-determination theory, along with collecting data using a five-scale Likert questionnaire. The study focused on local and international consulting and training firms that are registered and operational in Jordan. Managers, trainers, marketers, evaluators, consultants, and academics were the main participants of the sample, which was chosen with convenience sampling. There was a total of 518 employees in the sample. The results obtained through structural equation modeling show that WSMU greatly increases employee skills, with perceived competence being the strongest mediator. The research illustrates how social media is useful in promoting the sharing of knowledge, emotional care, and skill acquisition, which can be helpful to organizations in making use of digital interactions for the development of employees. Full article