The participants were Douyin users aged 18 to 29 living in Shenzhen. Using partial least squares structural equation modelling, the authors examined associations among the four overload dimensions, fatigue, flow experience and discontinuance intention. All four forms of overload were positively associated with discontinuance intention in the statistical model.

Fatigue served as a statistically supported mediator for information overload, system-feature overload and communication overload, indicating that fatigue accounted for part of their association with intentions to stop using Douyin. By contrast, social overload was associated with discontinuance intention without a statistically supported fatigue pathway. The researchers also examined flow experience as a moderator of the relationship between fatigue and discontinuance intention.

The fatigue-by-flow interaction was positive, with a coefficient of β = 0.112 and p = 0.013. Specifically, the conditional slope linking fatigue to discontinuance intention increased from 0.247 at low flow to 0.471 at high flow. This result showed that the fatigue–discontinuance association was stronger at higher flow levels rather than weaker.

The authors interpreted the finding as indicating that immersive engagement may coexist with heightened withdrawal intentions and, under high fatigue, amplify the association between fatigue and the intention to disengage. The analysis did not establish that flow caused either fatigue or discontinuance intention. The model explained 28.8% of the variance in fatigue and 47.4% of the variance in discontinuance intention.

These values represent the variation accounted for by the variables included in the model; they are not percentages of users who experienced fatigue or intended to discontinue Douyin. They also do not demonstrate that the model would perform similarly in other cities, age groups or platforms. Overall, the findings point to distinct pathways linking overload with discontinuance intention.

Information, system-feature and communication overload were associated with discontinuation partly through fatigue, while social overload had a different pattern. Because these are associations in a cross-sectional model, the results cannot establish whether overload preceded fatigue, whether fatigue increased withdrawal intentions over time, or whether users subsequently stopped using the platform. The study’s reliance on self-reported data from young adults in one Chinese city further limits what can be inferred about behaviour over time or beyond the surveyed population.

Subject of Research: Structural equation modelling of social media overload, fatigue, flow and discontinuance intention among Generation Z Douyin users in Shenzhen

Article Title: Social media overload, fatigue, and discontinuance intention among Generation Z Douyin users in Shenzhen, China: A cross-sectional structural equation modelling study

Article References: Peng, W., & Ismail, F. R. (2026). Social media overload, fatigue, and discontinuance intention among Generation Z Douyin users in Shenzhen, China: A cross-sectional structural equation modelling study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05563-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05563-6

Keywords: Douyin, Generation Z, social media overload, digital fatigue, discontinuance intention, flow experience, structural equation modelling, cross-sectional survey, Shenzhen, short-video platforms, Social, media

The study, led by Akgün Yeşiltepe of Munzur University and Canan Demir Barutcu of Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, surveyed 296 undergraduate nursing students during the 2022–2023 academic year. Participants completed a sociodemographic information form along with two validated instruments: the Smartphone Addiction Scale and the Nomophobia Questionnaire. The researchers then applied a battery of statistical techniques, including Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling, to untangle the relationships between problematic phone use and the fear of being disconnected.

The headline result is striking. Smartphone addiction was positively and moderately correlated with nomophobia, with a correlation coefficient of r = 0.544 and a p-value below 0.001, meaning the association is extremely unlikely to be a statistical fluke. In plain terms, students who scored higher on measures of compulsive smartphone use also reported markedly greater anxiety at the prospect of losing phone access. The multiple linear regression model was statistically significant and explained 47.0% of the variance in nomophobia scores, an unusually high figure for behavioral research, where models often account for far less.

Within that regression model, higher smartphone addiction scores significantly predicted higher nomophobia levels, with an unstandardized coefficient of B = 1.109, a standardized coefficient of β = 0.493, and p < 0.001. This means that even after accounting for other variables, smartphone addiction remained the dominant predictor of nomophobia in the sample. But the model also revealed a supporting cast of significant predictors that the researchers say deserve attention in their own right.

Age emerged as a significant predictor, with B = 2.107, β = 0.138, and p < 0.05, suggesting that older students in the sample reported higher nomophobia. Monthly income also played a role, with B = 0.002, β = 0.211, and p < 0.001, indicating that students with higher monthly income tended to report greater nomophobia, possibly because greater financial means facilitate more extensive smartphone and data use. Daily sleep duration was another significant factor, with B = 1.850, β = 0.094, and p < 0.05, hinting at a relationship between sleep patterns and phone-related anxiety that the authors say warrants further study.

Social media usage characteristics also mattered. The researchers found that use of specific platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, were significant predictors of nomophobia among the students. This suggests that it is not merely the device itself but the social ecosystems it hosts that feed the fear of disconnection. For nursing students, who often rely on digital communication for coordination with peers and clinical staff, the stakes of staying connected may be particularly high.

To test the robustness of their findings, the researchers turned to structural equation modeling, a technique that allows researchers to test theoretical models rather than just correlations between individual variables. The SEM results further supported the relationship, indicating that smartphone addiction positively and significantly predicted nomophobia with β = 0.62 and p < 0.001, and explained 38% of its variance with R² = 0.38. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to verify that the measurement instruments performed as intended in this specific population, adding methodological weight to the conclusions.

The authors frame nomophobia not as an isolated quirk but as a potential signal of technology-related psychological vulnerability. Nursing students may be particularly susceptible due to a combination of academic demands, frequent smartphone use, and heavy reliance on digital communication. The concern is not trivial: nomophobia has been linked in prior research to anxiety, sleep disturbance, and reduced academic performance, and nursing students face the added pressure of preparing for a profession where attention and emotional regulation are literally matters of patient safety.

The practical implications are significant for nursing education settings. The authors suggest that early identification of problematic smartphone use, combined with educational interventions addressing healthy smartphone habits, may help reduce nomophobia and support students’ well-being. Such interventions could include digital literacy training, awareness campaigns about the signs of compulsive phone use, and structured guidance on balancing screen time with clinical and academic responsibilities. Because the study is cross-sectional, it cannot prove causation; it is possible that nomophobia drives compulsive use just as much as the reverse, or that both stem from a common underlying vulnerability such as anxiety proneness.

The study was approved by the Mehmet Akif Ersoy University non-interventional clinical research ethics committee, and all participants gave informed consent electronically before completing the online questionnaire. The authors declare no competing interests and received no external funding. As smartphones continue to weave themselves into every corner of professional and personal life, the researchers argue that understanding the line between healthy connectivity and harmful dependence is becoming a core competency for the next generation of healthcare workers, not just a personal habit to be managed quietly.

Understanding why these findings matter requires a closer look at what nomophobia actually measures. The term, a shorthand for “no-mobile-phone phobia,” describes the situational anxiety that arises when a person cannot access their phone, whether because the battery has died, the device has been forgotten, or network coverage is unavailable. Researchers typically assess it across several dimensions, including fear of losing communication, losing connectedness, being unable to access information, and giving up convenience or the ability to check in with others. In the present study, the Nomophobia Questionnaire captured these dimensions, and the confirmatory factor analysis step was important precisely because it verified that the questionnaire’s underlying structure held together in this particular Turkish nursing student sample, rather than simply assuming that instruments validated elsewhere would behave identically here.

The distinction between smartphone addiction and nomophobia, while related, is worth drawing out. Smartphone addiction, as measured by the Smartphone Addiction Scale, generally reflects patterns of compulsive use: preoccupation with the device, tolerance effects, withdrawal-like feelings, and interference with daily functioning. Nomophobia, by contrast, is more specifically an anticipatory or situational anxiety about disconnection. The moderate correlation of r = 0.544 observed here suggests substantial overlap between the two constructs but not identity, meaning that a student can score high on compulsive use without necessarily experiencing severe separation anxiety, and vice versa. This partial independence is one reason the regression approach was informative: it allowed the researchers to isolate how much of nomophobia is uniquely attributable to addictive use patterns once demographic and behavioral factors were held constant.

The demographic predictors deserve careful interpretation. The positive association between age and nomophobia, for instance, runs counter to a common assumption that younger students, having grown up entirely within the smartphone era, would be the most attached to their devices. One plausible reading is that older nursing students face accumulating responsibilities, including clinical placements, family obligations, and financial pressures, that make constant availability feel more consequential. Similarly, the income finding, in which higher monthly income predicted greater nomophobia, may reflect the fact that students with more disposable income can afford premium data plans, newer devices, and continuous connectivity, making disconnection both more likely to be noticed and more disruptive when it occurs.

The sleep duration finding is particularly intriguing given the broader literature. Prior research has repeatedly documented bidirectional relationships between problematic smartphone use and sleep: late-night scrolling delays sleep onset, blue light exposure suppresses melatonin, and sleep deprivation in turn weakens the self-regulation capacities that normally restrain compulsive checking. The present study’s finding that daily sleep duration significantly predicted nomophobia, with a positive coefficient suggesting that longer sleepers reported somewhat higher nomophobia in this sample, complicates the simple narrative that phone use merely erodes sleep. It may instead reflect students using extended sleep as recovery from the fatigue of constant connectivity, or it may signal that the relationship between rest and phone-related anxiety is more nuanced than commonly assumed. The authors themselves flag this as an area warranting further study, and the cross-sectional design means no causal direction can be established.

The platform-specific findings also merit attention. That Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter use each emerged as significant predictors suggests that the architecture of social platforms, with their notification systems, algorithmic feeds, and social validation loops, may cultivate the very attachment patterns that underlie nomophobia. For nursing students, whose professional socialization increasingly occurs through digital channels, including group chats for clinical scheduling, online learning platforms, and professional networking, the boundary between necessary and problematic use becomes genuinely difficult to draw. A student cannot simply disconnect without risking professional consequences, which may amplify the anxiety associated with unavailability.

Methodologically, the use of structural equation modeling alongside multiple regression strengthens the study’s contribution. Whereas regression treats predictors as independent contributors to an outcome, SEM allows researchers to specify and test a theoretical structure, in this case one in which smartphone addiction functions as a latent driver of nomophobia. The convergence of the two approaches, with the regression model explaining 47.0% of variance and the SEM model explaining 38%, provides internal consistency, though the difference between the figures reflects the different variables and constraints each model incorporates. The very high proportion of variance explained in the regression model is notable for behavioral research, where models explaining 20 to 30 percent of variance are common, and suggests that the measured variables capture much of what drives nomophobia in this population.

Several limitations frame how these results should be generalized. The sample consisted of 296 nursing students at Turkish universities, and cultural context, nursing curricula structure, and institutional norms around phone use during clinical placements may differ substantially elsewhere. The cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, and self-report instruments are vulnerable to response biases, including social desirability and inaccurate self-assessment of usage. Longitudinal follow-up would help clarify whether smartphone addiction precedes nomophobia, follows from it, or whether both emerge from shared vulnerabilities such as trait anxiety or low emotional regulation. Nonetheless, the consistency of the findings across analytical methods, combined with the careful psychometric validation, makes this study a useful reference point for educators designing interventions. Screening for problematic smartphone use during nursing education, the authors suggest, could identify students at risk before phone-related anxiety interferes with clinical performance or well-being, an approach that aligns with growing interest in behavioral health support within health professional training programs.

Subject of Research: Smartphone addiction, social media use, and nomophobia among Turkish nursing students: a cross-sectional study

Article Title: Smartphone addiction, social media use, and nomophobia among Turkish nursing students: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Yeşiltepe, A., & Demir Barutcu, C. (2026). Smartphone addiction, social media use, and nomophobia among Turkish nursing students: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05265-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05265-9

Keywords: Smartphone, addiction, social, media, nomophobia, Turkish, nursing, students, cross-sectional, scientific research

The core challenge lies in the chemistry of the acidic environment itself. In alkaline electrolytes, many non-precious catalysts perform respectably, but the protons that give proton exchange membrane fuel cells their name are hostile to most transition metal active sites. Acid dissolves cobalt, corrodes carbon supports, and destabilizes the nitrogen-coordinated metal sites that researchers believe are responsible for the catalytic activity. This is precisely why the new material, which the authors call Co/C-MOF, is notable: it retains effective oxygen reduction performance in the very conditions that typically destroy platinum-free catalysts.

The synthesis strategy hinges on a clever dual functionalization of the MOF precursor. MOF-808 is a zirconium-based framework built from 1,3,5-benzenetricarboxylic acid linkers arranged around zirconium clusters, prized for its high stability and large pores. The researchers co-functionalized this framework with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, better known as EDTA, and cobalt nitrate. EDTA is a chelating agent with multiple carboxylate and amine groups that can grab cobalt ions and hold them in place. When the functionalized framework is carbonized at high temperature, the organic linkers and EDTA decompose into a nitrogen-doped carbon matrix while the cobalt species become embedded and stabilized throughout the resulting porous carbon.

This approach solves a problem that has plagued MOF-derived catalysts for years. During pyrolysis, metal atoms tend to migrate and aggregate into large particles, reducing the number of accessible active sites and degrading performance. By anchoring cobalt within the framework using EDTA before carbonization, the team ensured that cobalt-containing species remain homogeneously distributed across the carbon matrix. The nitrogen atoms from the EDTA and the amine functionalities dope the carbon lattice, creating the metal-nitrogen-carbon coordination environments that many researchers consider the true active sites for oxygen reduction in acidic media.

Characterization confirmed the design worked as intended. X-ray diffraction revealed the formation of a carbon framework with cobalt-containing species incorporated into it. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy showed the chemical states of cobalt and nitrogen, verifying that successful functionalization and cobalt stabilization had occurred. Scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy mapped the morphology and elemental distribution, showing a porous structure with cobalt spread evenly rather than clumped. Nitrogen adsorption-desorption isotherms quantified the porosity, confirming that the carbonized material retained the high surface area characteristic of its MOF ancestor.

Electrochemical testing put the material through its paces in acidic electrolyte. The catalyst exhibited an onset potential of 0.87 volts versus the reversible hydrogen electrode, a benchmark figure for non-precious oxygen reduction catalysts in acid. It delivered a current density of 7 milliamperes per square centimeter and presented an electrochemically active surface area of 25 square centimeters, indicating a large population of accessible catalytic sites. Chronoamperometry tests showed stable current retention over extended operation, a critical property for any catalyst hoping to survive the thousands of hours a commercial fuel cell must endure.

The numbers, while not yet matching the very best platinum catalysts, represent meaningful progress in the difficult acidic regime. Onset potentials for platinum in acid typically exceed 0.95 volts, but platinum-free catalysts have historically lagged well behind, often falling below 0.85 volts. The 0.87-volt onset achieved here, combined with stable current retention, places the Co/C-MOF catalyst among the more competitive platinum-free candidates reported for acidic oxygen reduction. The stability result is particularly significant because degradation of metal-nitrogen-carbon catalysts in acid, often through demetallation and carbon corrosion, remains the field’s central obstacle.

The broader context makes this work part of a global race. Proton exchange membrane fuel cells are central to hydrogen-powered vehicles, stationary power generation, and energy storage systems that could decarbonize transport and industry. Yet the cathode catalyst, which must reduce oxygen molecules using four electrons per reaction, accounts for a substantial share of fuel cell cost because of its platinum content. Platinum is scarce, expensive, and mined in politically sensitive regions. Replacing it with earth-abundant cobalt embedded in cheap carbon would slash costs and remove a key supply chain vulnerability for the hydrogen economy.

MOF-808 itself has become something of a workhorse in materials chemistry. The zirconium framework has been explored for lithium battery electrolytes, uranium capture from seawater, carbon dioxide capture, and microbial fuel cell cathodes. Its robust zirconium clusters and large pores make it an ideal scaffold for hosting functional guests. The new study extends this versatility to electrocatalysis, showing that the framework can serve as a sacrificial template whose architecture translates into a functional carbon-based catalyst after pyrolysis.

What remains to be seen is whether the catalyst can survive real fuel cell conditions, where humidity, start-stop cycling, and methanol crossover pose additional threats. The authors position Co/C-MOF as a promising platinum-free electrocatalyst for acidic media, and the evidence from their characterization and electrochemical measurements supports that claim at the laboratory scale. Scaling from rotating disk electrodes to membrane electrode assemblies, where mass transport and proton conduction add complexity, is the next frontier. But for a field that has spent two decades searching for a durable, cheap, and active replacement for platinum in acid, a cobalt catalyst born from a MOF scaffold offers a tangible step forward.

Subject of Research: Cobalt-based MOF-808-derived electrocatalyst with high activity for oxygen reduction reaction in acidic media

Article Title: Cobalt-based MOF-808-derived electrocatalyst with high activity for oxygen reduction reaction in acidic media

Article References: Esfahani, F. O., Nazari, O., Emadi, H., Lashkenari, M. S., & Chaichi, M. J. (2026). Cobalt-based MOF-808-derived electrocatalyst with high activity for oxygen reduction reaction in acidic media. Journal of Materials Science, 61(42), 33202-33219. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-026-13723-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10853-026-13723-7

Keywords: Cobalt-based, MOF-808-derived, electrocatalyst, high, activity, oxygen, reduction, reaction, acidic, media, scientific research

Published in Current Psychology, the study was led by Sławomir Rębisz of the University of Rzeszów, together with Paweł Grygiel and Sylwia Opozda-Suder of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and Roman Dolata of the University of Warsaw. The team surveyed 936 students from the University of Rzeszów, 78.1 percent of them female, with an average age of 21.64 years, drawn from 65 different academic programs. Rather than comparing two questionnaire totals, the researchers treated every single symptom as a node in a network and mapped the conditional connections between them, asking a question that total-score studies cannot answer: which specific components of problematic social media use are actually tied to which specific depressive symptoms?

The technical machinery behind the study is worth unpacking, because it represents a broader shift in how psychopathology is studied. The students completed the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, or BSMAS, which measures six addiction-like components derived from Griffiths’ components model of addiction: salience, tolerance, mood modification, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. They also completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, or PHQ-9, whose nine items correspond to the DSM symptom criteria for major depression, ranging from anhedonia and depressed mood to sleep disturbance, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, concentration difficulties, psychomotor changes, and suicidal ideation. The researchers then estimated a Graphical Gaussian Model with LASSO regularization, a statistical technique that shrinks weak partial correlations toward zero and sets some of them exactly to zero, so that only robust conditional associations survive. The Extended Bayesian Information Criterion selected the optimal regularization parameter, and nonparametric bootstrapping, including case-dropping subset bootstrapping, verified that the network’s central nodes remained stable when portions of the data were removed.

The first striking result concerns the architecture of the network itself. Using seven different community detection algorithms, including Louvain, Walktrap, Fast Greedy, Edge Betweenness, Label Propagation, Leading Eigen, and Infomap, the researchers tested whether the fifteen questionnaire items cluster into distinct communities. The answer was unambiguous on one side and revealingly messy on the other. The six BSMAS indicators formed a coherent, stable community in every single solution, structurally distinguishable from depressive symptoms. The PHQ-9 symptoms, by contrast, showed a heterogeneous organization that shifted depending on the algorithm. Some solutions divided depression into a somatic-vegetative component, containing insomnia, fatigue, and appetite changes, and a broader affective-cognitive-psychomotor component. Others placed concentration difficulties and psychomotor agitation or retardation with the somatic symptoms instead, or even carved them out as a separate small community. This boundary-like position of concentration problems and psychomotor symptoms mirrors a long-standing debate in the psychometric literature about whether the PHQ-9 is best described as essentially unidimensional or as two strongly related factors.

Within each domain, the centrality analysis identified the symptoms most strongly embedded in the internal structure of their own community. On the social media side, tolerance, the sense of needing increasing amounts of time online to achieve the same effect, emerged as the most central indicator, connecting most strongly with salience, the preoccupation with social media, and also with mood modification and withdrawal. On the depression side, sadness and guilt, the latter capturing dissatisfaction with oneself and feeling like a failure, were the most central symptoms, and they also formed the strongest connected pair in the entire PHQ-9. Yet here lies a subtle and important finding: tolerance, despite being the hub of the problematic-use community, did not form any direct connection with depressive symptoms at all. High centrality within one’s own domain, the study shows, does not automatically translate into relevance for cross-domain associations.

And that brings us to the study’s headline result, the one that gives the familiar correlation its precise shape. When the researchers examined bridge edges, the direct cross-domain connections between the two communities, they found exactly two. Not a diffuse web of associations linking every compulsive-use indicator to every depressive symptom, but two selective points of contact. The first connected sadness, one of the core symptoms of depression, with mood modification, the BSMAS component describing the use of social media to forget about personal problems. The second connected concentration difficulties with conflict, the component describing the disruptive impact of social media use on studying or work. Every other PHQ-9 symptom and every other BSMAS indicator was connected only within its own domain or showed no nonzero connection in the regularized network.

Each of these two bridges tells a different story. The sadness-mood modification edge is an affective-regulatory point of contact, and it fits neatly with the compensatory internet use theory proposed by Kardefelt-Winther, according to which online activity is undertaken in response to emotional difficulties or offline problems. It also aligns with longitudinal research showing that depressive symptoms may predict later increases in using the internet for mood regulation. But the researchers are careful: using social media to improve mood is not maladaptive in itself, and the edge may partly reflect broader negative affectivity or dispositional factors such as neuroticism, which is strongly associated with both depression and problematic technology use. The concentration problems-conflict edge, meanwhile, is a functional-cognitive point of contact, consistent with the deficient self-regulation perspective, in which uncontrolled internet use arises from difficulties in monitoring and regulating one’s own behavior. Attentional difficulties on the depression side were tied to the component of problematic use concerning disruption of academic and occupational responsibilities, a connection that previous network studies on problematic internet use and platform-specific use have also highlighted.

The practical implications are as counterintuitive as they are important. The findings do not support the simple conclusion that reducing time spent on social media, or temporary abstinence, is a sufficient strategy for improving students’ mental health. Recent meta-analytic evidence is mixed in this respect: one meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found only marginal beneficial effects of social media restriction on subjective well-being, while a meta-analysis focusing specifically on social media abstinence found no clear evidence that abstinence affected positive affect, negative affect, or life satisfaction. Instead, the study points toward helping students recognize when, why, in response to which emotions, and with what consequences they use social media. The aim should not be to discourage using social media to improve mood, but to broaden the repertoire of emotion-regulation and coping strategies: offline social contacts, behavioral activation, physical activity, problem-focused coping, and more intentional use of digital media. On the functional side, assessment should focus on the quality of concentration, sleep rhythm, task postponement, difficulty completing work, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to reduce use despite negative consequences.

The researchers are equally candid about the limits of their evidence. The study is cross-sectional, so the network edges describe conditional associations rather than temporal or causal relations; it is impossible to determine whether depressive symptoms precede an increase in problematic use, whether problematic use precedes an increase in depressive symptoms, or whether the relations are reciprocal. The sample came from a single university in a single country, the measures were self-reported, and the study did not assess specific patterns of social media activity, such as active versus passive use, platform-specific behaviors, or objective time spent online. The sadness-mood modification edge in particular may partly reflect the affective proximity of the two items or shared vulnerability factors rather than a construct-specific association. The authors frame their two bridge edges as hypothesis-generating findings that future longitudinal studies, cross-lagged panel network models, and ecological momentary assessment designs should test over time, ideally after accounting for neuroticism, self-control, stress, and offline social functioning.

What the study ultimately delivers is a more differentiated picture of a relationship that public discourse has often flattened into a simple cause-and-effect narrative. Problematic social media use and depression are structurally distinct, the new analysis shows, and their association is not a broad, diffuse entanglement but a concentrated structure with two selective points of contact: depressed mood tied to escapist use, and attentional difficulties tied to functional disruption. As of April 2026, active social media user identities worldwide had reached 5.79 billion, equivalent to 69.9 percent of the global population, making the stakes of getting this science right enormous. The message for universities, clinicians, and students themselves is not that social media is a poison to be abstained from, nor that the familiar correlation is meaningless, but that the meaningful questions are now symptom-specific: which emotions drive use, which functions it serves, and whether it remains under control or begins to interfere with the tasks of everyday life.

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Subject of Research: Mapping the symptom-level network between problematic social media use and depression among university students

Article Title: Mapping the symptom-level network between problematic social media use and depression among university students

Article References: Rębisz, S., Grygiel, P., Opozda-Suder, S., & Dolata, R. (2026). Mapping the symptom-level network between problematic social media use and depression among university students. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1628. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10200-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10200-x

Keywords: Mapping, symptom-level, network, between, problematic, social, media, depression, university, students, scientific research

The study population consisted of 146 girls and 163 boys with an average age of 16.0 years, recruited from two randomly selected high schools in Istanbul. The researchers calculated their minimum sample size using G*Power software, adopting a small-to-medium effect size consistent with Cohen’s criteria for the social and behavioral sciences, and determined that at least 285 students would be needed to detect significant relationships in correlation and regression analyses. Participants were physically and mentally healthy volunteers drawn from a total school population of 1,457 students. Height and body weight were measured directly, and body mass index-for-age percentiles were calculated according to standard pediatric classifications, with 78.3 percent of participants falling within the healthy weight range.

The methodological design relied on three validated psychometric instruments administered face-to-face. The social media use scale, developed by Deniz and Tutgun-Ünal, contains eight items divided into two subscales: continuity of social media use and social media use competence. The continuity subscale captures not merely the duration of daily use but the habitual, psychologically embedded nature of access, reflected in items such as checking accounts immediately before sleeping and right after waking. The social appearance anxiety scale, developed by Hart and colleagues and adapted into Turkish by Doğan, comprises 16 items assessing the anxiety and stress experienced when one’s physical appearance is evaluated by others. The Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire-Short Form, or EDE-Q-13, evaluates eating behaviors over the preceding 28 days across five subdimensions: eating restraint, shape and weight over-evaluation, body dissatisfaction, binging, and purging. Internal consistency coefficients for the three scales were 0.824, 0.930, and 0.890 respectively, indicating strong reliability.

The descriptive findings reveal the sheer ubiquity of social media in adolescent life. WhatsApp was the most widely used application at 83.2 percent, followed closely by Instagram at 81.2 percent. A substantial majority of participants, 73.8 percent, reported engaging with social media for one to five hours daily, a pattern consistent with previously reported global trends and reinforcing the view that digital platforms have become a primary environment for adolescent socialization. Gender differences emerged in platform preferences and behaviors: girls were significantly more likely to use Snapchat, to apply social media effects to their photos, and to care about friends’ opinions regarding shared photos. While 72.6 percent of adolescent girls indicated that peer feedback on their visual content mattered to them, only 38.0 percent of boys said the same.

The central statistical finding concerns social appearance anxiety, defined as the anxiety and stress experienced during the evaluation of one’s appearance by others. The mean social appearance anxiety score for girls was 38.1, significantly higher than the boys’ mean of 30.8. In the multiple linear regression model examining predictors of social appearance anxiety, the model was statistically significant and accounted for 26.4 percent of the variance. Three independent variables emerged as significant: being male was associated with lower anxiety, increasing age was associated with decreasing anxiety, and continuity of social media use was associated with increasing anxiety, with a coefficient of 0.963 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.520 to 1.406. This finding suggests that the habitual, always-on nature of social media access, rather than mere technical proficiency with digital devices, is what drives the psychological burden.

Correlation analysis further illuminated the web of relationships among the study variables. Social appearance anxiety was positively correlated with social media use continuity, eating restraint, shape and weight over-evaluation, body dissatisfaction, binging, purging, and overall eating disorder risk. The strongest correlations were with shape and weight over-evaluation and body dissatisfaction, both exceeding 0.43. Social media continuity itself was positively correlated with shape and weight over-evaluation, body dissatisfaction, and eating disorder risk. These bivariate associations paint a coherent picture: adolescents who remain continuously connected to social media report greater dissatisfaction with their bodies and more disordered eating attitudes.

However, the multivariate regression analysis for eating disorder risk revealed a more nuanced mechanism. The model accounted for 29.6 percent of the variance in eating disorder risk, but the direct effect of social media continuity dropped below statistical significance once social appearance anxiety was included. Instead, two independent variables remained significant: social appearance anxiety, with a coefficient of 0.068 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.053 to 0.083, and body mass index-for-age percentile, with a coefficient of 0.019. This pattern suggests that the observed risk is primarily driven by underlying psychological constructs rather than by social media use itself. The researchers interpret this as evidence that social appearance anxiety functions as the proximal psychological pathway through which continuous digital exposure translates into disordered eating attitudes.

The theoretical framework underlying these findings draws on body image theories, which hold that the media transmits social appearance ideals through which pressures regarding appearance are placed on individuals and comparisons are made. Social media users compare their own appearance with that of others and may edit their photos, generating negative thoughts about body image and body dissatisfaction. Body dissatisfaction, in turn, forms a basis for the development of eating disorders. The relationship may also be bidirectional: adolescents heavily exposed to idealized visual content may develop body image anxiety, while those with high body image anxiety may use social media as a tool to seek approval and attention regarding their appearance. The cross-sectional design prevents the establishment of causality, but the findings suggest that continuity of social media use and concerns about social appearance are mutually reinforcing factors that may trigger eating disorder risk through this process.

The broader epidemiological context amplifies the urgency of these results. Eating disorders are chronic and treatment-resistant physical and mental illnesses with high mortality rates, affecting all age groups, ethnicities, body sizes, socioeconomic statuses, and religions regardless of sex. Between 1999 and 2022, 22.36 percent of children and adolescents were reported to have disordered eating, and the incidence of eating disorders has increased over the last 40 years in parallel with the rise of social media use among adolescents. The present study also found that increasing body mass index-for-age percentile was associated with increased eating disorder risk, consistent with previous research by Flament and colleagues linking weight status to eating disorder diagnoses in community adolescents.

The authors acknowledge several limitations that temper generalization. The study was conducted in only one city and two high schools, potential confounding factors such as depression, anxiety disorders, self-esteem, and socioeconomic status were not examined, and the explanatory power of the regression models remained relatively limited. Pubertal development stages were not objectively determined, and body dissatisfaction was not directly assessed. Nevertheless, the conclusions carry practical weight. The researchers recommend designing social media literacy education programs for adolescents, organizing school activities to raise awareness, creating environments for face-to-face communication, and developing national policies aimed at conscious social media use. Educating adolescents about social media use and monitoring their usage, they argue, may be associated with a potential reduction in eating disorder risk and related health problems in the long term.

Subject of Research: Health

Article Title: Association between social media use, social appearance anxiety, and eating disorder risk in adolescents

Article References: Özkan, G. Ö., Yüce, M. N., & Karagöl, B. (2026). Association between social media use, social appearance anxiety, and eating disorder risk in adolescents. Frontiers in Nutrition, 13, Article 1812469. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2026.1812469

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2026.1812469

Keywords: adolescents, eating disorders, social media, social appearance anxiety, body image, mental health, nutrition, Association, between, social, media, appearance

The argument is exemplified through a media-making experience from a decade ago. The author, then a post-doctoral researcher and a few years into producing online media about their science, was invited to co-instruct an ant systematics-focused field course sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences. Working with students, they produced a set of short videos about what the students were learning. For one video, they interviewed the course instructors—all ant biology researchers—asking each the same question: why does ant diversity matter? The answer that both surprised and resonated most came from Jack Longino, a leading expert in ant alpha taxonomy who had, at the time of filming, described and named more than 130 new ant species. While other instructors emphasized the need to understand the biological world at large, Longino’s answer was strikingly different.

Longino admitted he was not sure why it matters, noting that it is simply something a lot of people study. Everybody knows what ants are, he observed, and there is a word for ant in every language. Whenever he goes to dinner parties, he said, pretty soon everybody gathers around him as he tells stories about ants—it kind of captures people’s attention. The response felt near to an admission that basic biology might not matter in a conventional sense. Yet Longino pointed to ways his work connects to people that nearly all natural history researchers can relate to. First, everyone has some baseline familiarity with nature. Second, people are curious to deepen their experience with the natural world and are fascinated by hearing directly from people who can provide that special insight. In today’s online media environment, everyone has an opportunity to share stories that reach and influence a broad range of people. Like Longino’s dinner parties, media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are places people regularly go to hear stories and connect with those sharing unique insights. Natural history researchers have interesting stories to tell and objects to show that provide special insights into our world—and the argument is that they need to show up to these online dinner parties and tell their stories more often.

So are museums actually talking about their collections and research online? The evidence suggests largely not. Though many natural history museums are housed in institutions with public-facing missions, exhibits, and programming, museum collections and the research they facilitate have been largely inaccessible to public audiences. In recent decades, digital efforts have opened access in a few ways: online specimen digitization has provided digital access to collections, and collections-based research has engaged public audiences through citizen and participatory science projects. Despite these efforts, there is a persistent recognition of a field-wide need to better communicate the value of museums. A consensus report on biological collections from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that a consistent challenge facing biological collections is a lack of awareness of their value, and that the collections community needs to improve its ability to communicate the importance of specimens in research and education to a wider audience, especially to funders and decision makers.

Social scientists have made informative assessments of what natural history museums communicate through online platforms, and they have found that stories about collections and research functions are largely missing. In a study of the Museum of Natural History of Florence, researchers found that sharing information about collections was mentioned only once among nine stated communication objectives across six social media platforms. The museum’s content was mostly focused on promoting tourist visitation, generated mostly as an instrument for communicating the museum’s activities to potential or actual visitors. Another study analyzed Instagram posts from 108 different science museum accounts and found that 31 percent of posts had no science-related content, only 11 percent depicted a science-related professional, and fewer than 1 percent provided any information about the scientific process or discovery. Instead, the posts promoted public-facing exhibits and activities, missing opportunities to raise awareness of the inner workings of the museum. This practice of using social media primarily for event listings and promotion is pervasive beyond natural history museums, having also been documented in US history and art museums and across nearly 300 museums in Berlin and Prague.

More recently, the author and collaborators assessed 574 English-language YouTube videos published in 2019 and 2023 by 28 US natural history museums with collections and research staff. Of those videos, 24 percent—or 137—were uploads of live event recordings, a practice of using YouTube as an archive for live recordings and hoping that users will watch this second-hand content instead of content made specifically for the platform. For the remainder, made specifically to communicate to a YouTube audience, the content was categorized by main topic. Across all videos, only 16 percent were about original research and just 6 percent were about collections or specimens. Most videos posted were promotional content about museum exhibits and programs, much as the earlier studies reported. This is a practice akin to using social media accounts like a physical billboard, advertising to locals who might be driving by. However, social media platforms are global in their reach, and much of the potential audience will likely never physically visit a particular museum. Using museum accounts to primarily advertise to in-person visitors means the content is irrelevant to most of a platform’s users—a non-consideration also reflected in the finding that nearly a quarter of natural history museum YouTube content consists of second-hand live recordings.

There is, however, good news in this collective assessment: it reveals an opportunity. Collections and research facilitated by natural history museums have been the basis of many successful and effective social media channels—most happening off main museum institutional pages. YouTube remains the most popular and widely used social media platform across all age demographics, and several examples demonstrate what effective museum content looks like. The American Museum of Natural History, in stark contrast to its institutional output, debuted an eight-episode YouTube series called Insectarium! centered on research and hosted by an AMNH curator. Each episode, directed and produced by museum staff, featured researchers on-screen and in the field doing their work. The on-screen host, Dr. Jessica Ware, contextualized both the information and the research from her perspective as a museum entomologist and curator, often presenting from inside the collections themselves. The videos have been viewed millions of times, humanizing science and providing a diverse portrait of museum work by centering women and people from a broad range of racial backgrounds. The series was funded through a National Science Foundation grant to PBS Digital Studios and published on the PBS Terra channel—meaning viewers will not find these views of museum science on the museum’s main YouTube page.

Other examples reinforce the pattern. Both the Field Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have institutional-branded YouTube channels dominated by uploads of live event recordings, with total view counts under six million and subscriber audiences under 20,000 relative to hundreds of uploads over fifteen or more years. This is contrasted by two channels that have operated within these museums focusing on communicating museum-based research and collections activity: The Brain Scoop, formerly with the Field Museum, and Ant Lab, the author’s own channel while at NCMNS. With tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, both channels reach larger audiences than their respective institutions. The Brain Scoop, created and hosted by Emily Graslie, began when Graslie started filming behind-the-scenes stories from working at the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum at the University of Montana. From there, Graslie was hired into the Field Museum to continue producing collections and research focused stories, finding success in presenting behind-the-scenes portrayals of research and humanized interviews with researchers themselves. Ant Lab started out of a desire to create video-based summaries of the author’s own research papers, expanding into entomology-focused natural history content and behind-the-scenes access to colleagues’ work. In contrast, the channel Odd Animal Specimens focuses strictly on presenting informative videos about biological museum specimens and is produced by a full-time independent content producer without a museum staff appointment, built early on around specimens from the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology. Its visually stylized, educational, specimen-based approach has attracted millions of subscribers and more than one billion video views—a proof of value and public interest in specimen-based content.

The implications of storytelling as an application of basic research are significant. Successful natural history museum media can be made from many different creator perspectives: Insectarium! and Brain Scoop show collaboration between museum research and communication staff, Ant Lab is produced solely by a museum researcher, and Odd Animal Specimens is produced entirely outside museum communication efforts. Regardless of who creates the content, stories about natural history collections and museum-based research have proven their interest to large audiences. The media environment is not saturated with this type of content, and there remain great opportunities for individuals within and beyond natural history museums to tell their stories. Doing so will benefit the museum field at large and, potentially, individual careers in unexpected ways. In the author’s own experience, making media about museum-based science has reconfigured what doing scholarly work looks like—now, when pursuing new research projects, they consider what they can do to produce work relevant to a peer-professional audience as well as an interested-public audience. Because the work has been made accessible and interesting to public audiences, collaborations with artists, opportunities with public-television shows, and speaking engagements have followed that would not have been accessible otherwise. Generating online content has also opened additional revenue streams for the lab, making it possible to fund student research and assistantships through things like adsense revenue on YouTube and funds from content licensing. Of course, putting considerable time and effort into online content creation has meant doing less traditional scholarly work, and content creation is not without its own challenges.

A main challenge of online platforms is navigating—and hopefully breaking through—their algorithm-driven recommendation systems to find an audience. Platforms like YouTube have changed from an original broadcast-yourself ethos to a place where mainstream legacy broadcast television shows post videos competing for attention from the same audience an amateur creator might hope to reach. A platform’s focus on audience attention and user engagement also means science content must compete with sensationalized click-bait, emotionally-charged anecdotes, and even content intentionally made to misinform. This can lead to the most-watched science videos on a particular topic being those with misinformation made by non-experts with commercial bias. Social science experts observe that this is a new media ecosystem wherein scientists must compete in an attention economy in which they are just one of many voices, and in which proprietary algorithms now serve as a new kind of gatekeeper. Collectively, this can make getting started and finding an audience seem like an impossible task for individuals or institutions beginning to create content in addition to the time required for traditional work. However, most scientists have stories that no one else can tell, and most museums have specimens and collections that many people do not have access to or have never even seen. Showcasing unique personal stories, specimens, and spaces is how natural history museum content can break through a competitive online media marketplace. The professionalization of science communication also offers an opportunity to reframe online storytelling as professional work—for individual researchers, whether collaborating with a producer or making content themselves, it is important to legitimize this work as part of a portfolio of scholarly output, through interacting with professional science communication societies, publishing in science communication journals, and applying for awards specifically for those who communicate science to public audiences. The hope, ultimately, is that those in the museum collections and research field will continue to find value in telling stories about their work at dinner parties—and that some will find inspiration to bring those stories beyond the dinner party and onto online media platforms as well.

Subject of Research: Online media as an application of natural history museum science

Article Title: Online media as an application of natural history museum science

Article References: Smith, A. A. (2026). Online media as an application of natural history museum science. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 3, Article e176227. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.3.176227

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.3.176227

Keywords: Online, media, application, natural, history, museum, science, scientific research

The central challenge the authors describe is that a porous sound absorber is not one material but two: a fluid phase, typically the air trapped in the pore network, and a solid phase, known as the skeleton, which may be a polymer foam, a fibrous mat, or a granular assembly. Predicting how such a medium behaves when sound waves strike it requires knowing the parameters of both phases. The seminal work of M. A. Biot in the 1950s provides the theoretical framework for coupling the two, but the practical business of measuring the underlying numbers is where laboratory ingenuity comes in. For an isotropic material, the fluid phase is described by quantities such as open porosity, static air-flow resistivity, tortuosity, viscous and thermal characteristic lengths, and static thermal permeability, while the solid phase requires its mass density, Young’s modulus, loss factor, and Poisson’s ratio.

These parameters are not arbitrary. The widely used Johnson-Champoux-Allard-Lafarge model, or JCAL, needs six fluid-phase parameters to compute the dynamic mass density, which captures visco-inertial dissipation, and the dynamic bulk modulus, which captures thermal dissipation. Combined with the four elastic parameters of the skeleton, this yields the ten-parameter Biot-JCAL model, the workhorse of modern vibro-acoustic prediction. Simpler models exist for materials with particular morphologies: the Delany-Bazley-Miki model needs only flow resistivity and porosity, while the limp model for very soft materials such as cotton-candy-like foams requires nothing more than the skeleton’s mass density. The review emphasizes that choosing the right model is itself a characterization decision, because the number of parameters a laboratory must determine depends on the physics assumed.

Direct measurements form the first category of techniques, and three fluid-phase parameters can be obtained this way. Static air-flow resistivity, standardized in ISO 9053-1, is measured by forcing air through a sample of known thickness and area and recording the pressure drop, an application of Darcy’s law borrowed and adapted from the geosciences, where rocks rather than foams were the original targets. Open porosity, the fraction of a material’s volume accessible to the acoustic wave, can be measured by compressing the air in an enclosure containing a sample and reading the pressure increase, a method related to the gas pycnometer used for geomaterials, or alternatively by weighing a dry sample and then saturating it with a fluid of known density, an application of Archimedes’ principle. The review notes that larger samples yield more accurate porosity results in both approaches.

The high-frequency limit of dynamic tortuosity, which quantifies how the winding pore paths lengthen the effective route of sound through the medium, was historically measured by saturating the sample with an electrically charged liquid and measuring the electrical resistance across it. These methods, now largely abandoned, required the skeleton to be an electrical insulator and prior knowledge of the porosity, and they struggled with the very materials that exhibit the highest tortuosity values, whose pore sizes of a few microns resist complete saturation. The remaining fluid-phase parameters, including the viscous and thermal characteristic lengths and the static thermal permeability, must be estimated indirectly, typically by combining impedance tube measurements with a physical model.

Indirect estimation has become the dominant paradigm, and the impedance tube is its central instrument. In the late 1990s, the technique gained popularity when a third microphone placed inside the rigid backing allowed researchers to measure the pressure behind the sample, simplifying the extraction of the dynamic bulk properties. Building on this, Panneton and Olny showed in 2006 that four JCAL parameters governing viscous dissipation could be recovered analytically from such measurements, and the approach was later extended to retrieve all six JCAL parameters from low- and high-frequency asymptotes. The three-microphone technique is currently in the standardization process via ISO 10534-3, a proposition already submitted, reflecting how laboratory practice matures into international consensus. The review also highlights subtleties that can corrupt results: air leaking around the sample can create double-porosity effects that alter the measured properties, and vibrations of the skeleton itself can contaminate the data, which experimenters mitigate with Teflon tape rather than wax, or by adding nails to shift skeleton resonances out of the measurement range.

Ultrasound methods offer a complementary route. By measuring the speed of sound in a sample of known thickness and porosity, researchers can quickly estimate tortuosity and even map heterogeneity across a material. However, at ultrasound frequencies, multiple scattering can appear in media with pore sizes of hundreds of microns, a phenomenon not accounted for in classical visco-thermal models. Clever workarounds have been developed, including successive measurements in two different fluids to separate and exclude scattering effects from the estimates of the characteristic lengths. Time-domain methods, in which reflected or transmitted impulse waves are analyzed, have also been explored since the early 2000s to estimate porosity, tortuosity, and flow resistivity, though the review describes this approach as still in a sparse state of development with perspectives for complementary robust characterization.

On the elastic side, the review reveals a field riddled with practical difficulties. Interlaboratory tests have shown large deviations between values of Young’s moduli and loss factors obtained by different methods, with the main deviations traced to the frequency range and the initial condition, whether imposed load or imposed strain. Uniaxial compression, the most common technique due to its apparent simplicity, is influenced by at least four factors: the possible anisotropy of the material, the temperature and frequency dependence of visco-elastic behavior, the static strain or stress dependence, and the coupling with the fluid phase as air enters and leaves the sample during compression. For fibrous materials, anisotropy is particularly critical because the elastic parameters along the fibers can differ significantly from those perpendicular to them. Moreover, polymer skeletons exhibit glass transition temperatures typically between minus twenty and twenty degrees Celsius, meaning their stiffness changes dramatically across ordinary laboratory conditions, yet few characterizations are performed at multiple temperatures and frequencies.

The review also confronts the frontier of new materials that defy classical characterization. Activated carbon exhibits a sorption phenomenon that makes direct porosity measurement impossible. Natural fibers typically display multiple scales of porosity, as did early 3D-printed materials, though this tendency is decreasing as printing precision improves. Fractal microstructures and nanomaterials present further challenges, with nanomaterials often difficult to manufacture in prototype samples large enough for impedance tube or ultrasound testing. Characterization in extreme environments, including high temperature for muffler and thermo-acoustic applications, high pressure, water-saturated conditions for building and underwater uses, and in-situ end-of-chain measurements, is actively being developed. Meanwhile, standardization is evolving faster than ever, with newly published standards attempting to be more critical and informative about methods while remaining open to new techniques, as illustrated by the fundamental differences explained between diffuse-field transmission on large samples and impedance-tube transmission on small ones.

The authors close with reminders that apply across the discipline. Uncertainties in measurements are now regularly reported, improving reliability. Anisotropy remains a slowly growing research area despite its importance for fibrous materials, because it multiplies the number of parameters required as scalar quantities become tensors. Statistical approaches, particularly Bayesian methods, and machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to identify and correct errors in measurement data, aided by the commercial availability of material databases. On the acoustic side, the low-frequency parameters remain difficult to characterize even though the low-frequency range is of tremendous importance for sound-absorbing materials. On the elastic side, broadband frequency characterization remains the exception rather than the rule. The review ends with a quote from Tamas Pritz that captures the field’s philosophy: the simpler the method, the better to have reliable results, a reminder that no characterization technique is perfect and that combining complementary methods often provides the most robust and comprehensive picture of the materials that make our world quieter.

Subject of Research: Acoustics

Article Title: Characterizations of acoustical porous media: standardized methods, current trends and challenges

Article References: Jaouen, L., Bécot, F.-X., & Chevillotte, F. (2025). Characterizations of acoustical porous media: standardized methods, current trends and challenges. Frontiers in Acoustics, 3, Article 1543456. https://doi.org/10.3389/facou.2025.1543456

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/facou.2025.1543456

Keywords: acoustics, porous materials, sound absorption, impedance tube, standardization, Biot model, characterization, Characterizations, acoustical, porous, media, standardized

The study, conducted by Tuo Zhang, Peng Li, Akmar Hayati Ahmad Ghazali, Nur Atirah Kamaruzaman, and Shougui Pang, set out to answer a question that has puzzled sociologists and communication scholars for years: through what relational pathways do modern forms of connection — digital media use and cross-border ties — become associated with generalized trust? Rather than assuming that more connectivity equals more trust, the researchers distinguished between two distinct relational routes. The first is an expansion-oriented pathway, captured by occupational network heterogeneity, meaning the diversity of occupational positions a person can access through their contacts, from university professors and lawyers to farmers and hairdressers. The second is an embeddedness-oriented pathway, captured by neighborhood social embeddedness, which reflects repeated face-to-face interaction, familiarity, and mutual support within identifiable local relationships.

To test these ideas, the team analyzed responses from 5,307 participants in the 2023 Chinese General Social Survey household module, a nationally representative sample. Generalized social trust was measured with a single survey item asking whether most people can generally be trusted, rated on a four-point scale. Digital media use intensity was constructed from three indicators — frequency of internet use, whether the internet was the primary information source, and how often the internet was used during leisure time — combined into a single composite score using principal component analysis. Cross-border relational ties were identified by whether respondents had relatives, friends, or acquaintances living abroad. Occupational network heterogeneity was counted as the number of occupational categories, out of ten, in which respondents personally knew someone. Neighborhood social embeddedness combined how often people interacted with neighbors, how many neighbors they greeted, and how many neighbors they could turn to for help.

The results were striking in their asymmetry. Digital media use intensity showed a consistent negative association with generalized social trust across multiple statistical specifications — baseline ordinary least squares regression, ordered logit and probit models, multinomial logistic regression, survey-weighted estimates, and multiple imputation analyses for missing data. In other words, the more intensely people engaged with digital media, the less they tended to trust strangers, and this pattern held up under nearly every robustness check the researchers ran. By contrast, cross-border relational ties — having connections abroad — showed no significant direct association with generalized trust at all. Having overseas contacts, it seems, neither builds nor erodes trust in unfamiliar others in any measurable way.

Both digital media use intensity and cross-border ties were strongly and positively associated with occupational network heterogeneity. People who used digital media more intensively reported knowing individuals across a wider range of occupational positions, and those with cross-border connections reported even broader occupational networks — cross-border ties increased the expected occupational network range by approximately 35 percent, according to negative binomial count models. But here is the critical twist: occupational network heterogeneity itself showed no significant association with generalized social trust. Knowing a professor, a nurse, a police officer, and a farmer does not, by itself, make someone more likely to believe that most people can be trusted. The expansion of relational boundaries, in this data, opened doors to diverse contacts without generating the deeper experiential foundations that trust in strangers seems to require.

Neighborhood social embeddedness told a very different story. It was positively and consistently associated with generalized social trust across every model specification the researchers tested — baseline models, alternative ordinal specifications, weighted estimates, multiple imputation, and both rural and urban subsamples. The association persisted even after the researchers removed the single item most directly referring to receiving help from neighbors, a targeted sensitivity analysis designed to rule out conceptual overlap between the two constructs. This suggests that the repeated, familiar, mutually supportive interactions of neighborhood life — not merely the availability of help — provide an experiential foundation from which people generalize expectations of trustworthiness to broader social others.

Perhaps the most theoretically intriguing finding concerns the indirect pathways. Digital media use intensity was positively associated with neighborhood social embeddedness after adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic covariates, and this produced a small but statistically significant positive indirect association linking digital media use to generalized trust through neighborhood ties. However, the researchers were careful to flag an important caveat: this positive adjusted association actually reverses the negative zero-order correlation between digital media use and neighborhood embeddedness observed in the raw data. Supplementary diagnostic analyses showed that the sign reversal emerged only after accounting for age and education, a pattern consistent with statistical suppression rather than a straightforward positive relationship. The indirect pathway, the authors emphasize, should be understood as a small, covariate-adjusted, model-dependent channel — not as evidence that heavier digital media use generally strengthens neighborhood life.

The coexistence of a negative direct association between digital media use and generalized trust alongside a small positive indirect association through neighborhood embeddedness creates what statisticians call an inconsistent indirect association structure. Digital media engagement, in this framework, is neither uniformly trust-eroding nor trust-building; it participates in multiple relational processes that pull in different directions. The authors suggest that intensive digital media use may coexist with informational fragmentation, uneven information credibility, and weakly contextualized social encounters — conditions that do not necessarily foster confidence in unfamiliar others. They caution, however, that their data do not directly measure media credibility, information disorder, or platform governance, so these interpretations remain theoretically informed rather than empirically tested mechanisms.

The urban–rural comparison added further nuance. The negative association between digital media use intensity and generalized trust was significant among rural residents but statistically insignificant among urban residents, with a significant interaction term between digital media use and urban residence. Yet the positive association between neighborhood social embeddedness and generalized trust remained stable across both rural and urban groups, reinforcing the argument that locally embedded relational experiences provide a more consistent foundation for generalized trust than relational expansion, regardless of residential context.

The broader implication is a challenge to connectivity-centered thinking about social capital. Expanding relational boundaries — whether through digital platforms or transnational ties — creates opportunities for diverse contacts but does not by itself produce the repeated interaction, reciprocity, and social predictability that appear to underpin generalized trust. Instead, the study points toward the enduring value of locally embedded relationships: the neighbors we greet, the familiar faces on the street, the people we know we can knock on when something goes wrong. In an era when digital transformation and social mobility continue to reshape interpersonal life in China and beyond, the findings suggest that trust in strangers is not a simple byproduct of being connected to more people. It grows, if it grows at all, from the accumulated experience of reliable, reciprocal, face-to-face relationships — a foundation that no amount of online connectivity can fully replace.

Subject of Research: The relationship between digital media use, cross-border relational ties, and generalized social trust in contemporary China

Article Title: Digital media use intensity, cross-border relational ties and generalized social trust: occupational network heterogeneity and neighborhood social embeddedness in contemporary China

Article References: Zhang, T., Li, P., Ghazali, A. H. A., Kamaruzaman, N. A., & Pang, S. (2026). Digital media use intensity, cross-border relational ties and generalized social trust: occupational network heterogeneity and neighborhood social embeddedness in contemporary China. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1911185. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1911185

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1911185

Keywords: generalized social trust, digital media use, cross-border relational ties, neighborhood social embeddedness, occupational network heterogeneity, social capital, China General Social Survey, trust in strangers, relational pathways, urban-rural differences, Digital, media

The research, led by a team at the Faculty of Medicine Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, in Bangkok, and published in the British Journal of Biomedical Science, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: does the timing of when you collect the embryo’s culture medium matter for the reliability of non-invasive preimplantation genetic testing, known as niPGT? The investigators hypothesized that extending embryo culture by just six hours, from 48 to 54 hours after the cleavage stage, might increase the amount of cell-free DNA released by the embryo into its surroundings, thereby improving the quality of the genetic signal that can be captured from the medium.

The biological logic behind this hypothesis is grounded in embryology. Aneuploid embryos, those carrying the wrong number of chromosomes, are known to develop more slowly than their euploid counterparts, with delays in key developmental milestones such as compaction and blastulation often exceeding six hours. Because cell-free DNA in the culture medium is thought to originate from apoptotic cells shed by the embryo during its normal cellular turnover, a modest extension of the culture period could, in theory, allow more time for this DNA to accumulate, particularly in embryos with delayed developmental kinetics. The researchers reasoned that capturing sufficient embryonic DNA would be especially important for those slow-developing embryos, which are more likely to be aneuploid and thus the very ones a screening test most needs to identify correctly.

To test this idea, the team enrolled 15 infertile women aged between 30 and 45 years who were undergoing IVF at their reproductive endocrinology and infertility unit between August 2020 and February 2021. From these patients, a total of 58 embryos were procured and analyzed. All embryos were created through intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a technique in which a single sperm is injected directly into a mature egg, and then cultured sequentially in droplets of specialized fertilization and cleavage media. On the third day after fertilization, when embryos had reached the cleavage stage, each was subjected to laser-assisted hatching, a procedure in which a small opening is made in the protective zona pellucida surrounding the embryo. This step is critical for non-invasive testing because it facilitates the release of cellular material into the culture medium as the embryo continues to develop.

Each patient’s embryos were assigned to one of two groups, with all embryos from a given patient biopsied at the same time point to avoid any overlap between conditions. One group had their trophectoderm biopsied and their spent culture media collected 48 hours after the cleavage stage, while the other group underwent the same procedures 54 hours after cleavage. The trophectoderm is the outer layer of cells that will eventually form the placenta, and biopsying it on day five of development is the current standard of care for preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy, or PGT-A. By comparing the genetic results obtained from the spent culture media against those from the trophectoderm biopsy, the researchers could assess how well the non-invasive approach matched the conventional invasive one.

On the laboratory side, the spent culture media samples were processed using a commercial non-invasive PGT kit that employs whole genome amplification, a technique that makes millions of copies of whatever DNA is present in the sample so that it can be sequenced. The amplified DNA was then subjected to ultra-low-pass whole genome sequencing, a cost-effective approach that reads only a small fraction of the genome but enough to determine whether the embryo has the correct number of each chromosome. The sequencing depth was approximately 0.01 times, generating between 400,000 and 500,000 reads per sample. Negative control samples, consisting of culture droplets that had never contained embryos but were cultured under identical conditions, were processed alongside the experimental samples to monitor for environmental contamination.

The results were revealing in several ways. First, the amount of cell-free DNA found in the spent culture media was remarkably consistent between the two time points, with median quantities of 27.8 nanograms per milliliter at 48 hours and 25.8 nanograms per milliliter at 54 hours, a difference that was not statistically significant. The success rate of DNA amplification was 93.1 percent at both time points, and the negative control samples yielded negligible DNA quantities of less than one nanogram per milliliter, confirming that the laboratory protocols were effective at preventing contamination. However, when the researchers compared the ploidy results from the spent culture media against those from the trophectoderm biopsy, the overall concordance rate was just 53.7 percent, meaning that the non-invasive test agreed with the conventional biopsy in only about half of the cases.

Breaking down the results further, the ploidy concordance rate was 48.2 percent in the 48-hour group and 59.3 percent in the 54-hour group, a difference that was not statistically significant. The sensitivity of the non-invasive test for identifying euploid embryos was 55.6 percent, while its specificity was 52.8 percent. The positive predictive value, which reflects the probability that an embryo called euploid by the non-invasive test truly is euploid, was just 37 percent. The negative predictive value, which reflects the probability that an embryo called aneuploid by the non-invasive test truly is aneuploid, was 70.4 percent. Interestingly, the 54-hour group showed a trend toward a higher negative predictive value, suggesting that sampling at a later time point might improve the ability to correctly exclude aneuploid embryos, though the wide confidence intervals in the data indicate that the subgroup analysis was statistically underpowered.

One area where the non-invasive approach performed notably better was in determining the sex of the embryo. The overall concordance rate for sex determination reached 79.6 percent, with the 54-hour group showing a higher rate of 85.1 percent compared to 74.1 percent in the 48-hour group. While this difference was not statistically significant, the trend suggests that extending the culture period may improve the reliability of sex chromosome identification. The researchers note that for couples at risk of passing on X-linked genetic disorders, non-invasive sex determination could hold genuine value for informed reproductive planning, and some IVF clinics have already begun adopting similar techniques for clinical use, resulting in successful pregnancies.

The study’s findings largely confirm what previous research has suggested about the limitations of early sampling for non-invasive genetic testing. Prior studies have reported concordance rates between spent culture media and trophectoderm biopsy ranging from 62.1 percent to 88.9 percent, with higher rates typically achieved when sampling occurs at later developmental stages. Recent work has demonstrated that day-six sampling yields higher quantities of cell-free DNA and superior concordance rates, and some groups have even extended culture to day seven with promising results. The current study’s finding that a six-hour extension from 48 to 54 hours made no meaningful difference suggests that the relationship between culture duration and DNA yield may not be linear, and that substantially later sampling may be necessary before non-invasive testing can achieve the accuracy required for clinical application.

The researchers acknowledge several limitations of their work. The study was conducted at a single center with a small sample size, which limits the generalizability of the findings. There was no randomization or strict matching regarding the exact developmental stage and morphological grading of embryos, and variation in embryo development kinetics could influence the quantity and quality of DNA released into the culture medium. Perhaps most importantly, maternal DNA contamination in the spent culture media was not quantitatively assessed using techniques such as short-tandem repeat analysis or methylation profiling. Cumulus cells, which surround the egg and are shed during fertilization, have been identified as a significant source of maternal DNA that can contaminate the culture medium and confound the genetic results. Future studies should incorporate robust maternal DNA quantification techniques to ensure the accuracy and reliability of non-invasive testing results.

Despite the disappointing ploidy results, the researchers remain optimistic about the broader potential of non-invasive preimplantation genetic testing. The approach demands less technical expertise than traditional trophectoderm biopsy, which requires a highly skilled embryologist and specialized micromanipulation equipment. It also carries lower costs and eliminates the need for direct embryo manipulation, which could circumvent potential religious and legal dilemmas in regions where embryo biopsy is prohibited. The technique could be particularly valuable for IVF laboratories that lack access to a skilled embryologist for biopsy procedures, and it could reduce embryo damage by eliminating the need for an additional biopsy when combined with preimplantation genetic testing for monogenic disorders.

Looking ahead, the researchers argue that a deeper exploration of non-invasive preimplantation genetic testing is imperative before it can be integrated into routine clinical practice. The question of whether the DNA found in culture media truly represents the authentic karyotype of the embryo remains unresolved, with theoretical speculation suggesting that the spent medium contains apoptotic cells from both the inner cell mass and the trophectoderm, arising from either abnormal cells or the embryo’s inherent cellular clearance process. Large multicenter prospective studies have demonstrated that cell-free DNA represents both the inner cell mass and the trophectoderm, with concordance rates of 78 to 90 percent when maternal contamination is tightly controlled. However, other studies have reported much lower concordance rates of 20 to 60 percent, often attributed to maternal contamination or variations in laboratory protocols. Until these technical challenges are resolved and standardized protocols are established across laboratories, the promise of non-invasive embryo screening remains just that, a promise waiting to be fulfilled.

Subject of Research: Application of non-invasive preimplantation genetic screening for aneuploidy through spent embryo culture media analysis at 48 and 54 hours after embryo cleavage

Article Title: Application of non-invasive preimplantation genetic screening for aneuploidy through spent embryo culture media analysis at 48 and 54 hours after embryo cleavage

Article References: Satirapod, C., Niransuk, P., Tantanavipas, S., Sensorn, I., Chantratita, W., & Trachoo, O. (2026). Application of non-invasive preimplantation genetic screening for aneuploidy through spent embryo culture media analysis at 48 and 54 hours after embryo cleavage. British Journal of Biomedical Science, 83, Article 15905. https://doi.org/10.3389/bjbs.2026.15905

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/bjbs.2026.15905

Keywords: Application, non-invasive, preimplantation, genetic, screening, aneuploidy, spent, embryo, culture, media, analysis, hours

The concept of a wicked problem originated in the 1970s to describe social challenges like poverty and urban decay that governments could not easily define, measure, or solve. Wicked problems are fundamentally unique, lack a linear timeline or exhaustively describable set of solutions, and are often symptoms of other problems. They are systemic, ambiguous, complex, and conflictual. Hernández and Munz contend that violence against women and girls fits this profile precisely: it is sustained by intersecting cultural, institutional, and structural conditions that no single policy, campaign, or newsroom guideline can untangle. Scholars have applied the wicked problem framing to domestic violence policy cascades, workplace sexual violence in Australian mining, and violence against queer communities, each time finding that solutions must address systemic and cultural shifts rather than isolated incidents.

Against this backdrop, the researchers trace decades of scholarship showing how news coverage of gender violence repeatedly falls into damaging patterns. Foundational work by Meyers demonstrated that news representations construct women and victims as deviants worthy of condemnation rather than focusing on perpetrators. More recent analyses of UK newspaper coverage of domestic violence found techniques that blamed victims, sexualized violence, and invoked discourses of deserving or undeserving victims. Australian studies of high-profile sexual assault cases revealed how routine journalism practices—the inverted pyramid method, quoting strategies, and story structuring—objectified victims, minimized their experiences, and framed violent acts graphically and salaciously while emphasizing negative impacts on accused perpetrators.

Content analyses reinforce these trends across contexts. In Indonesia, more than half of nearly 700 news articles about violence against women and girls failed to reveal the social roots of gender violence or provide informational support for survivors. Australian research found that news coverage infrequently situated violence within broader social contexts, rarely included information on how and where to seek help, and disproportionately emphasized law enforcement and criminal justice spokespersons over survivors, advocates, and educators. By using episodic framing that depicts violence as isolated events, the authors argue, journalists distance such acts from the structures that perpetuate them, contradicting public health discourses that position gender violence as systematic and rooted in patriarchy, male dominance, and misogyny.

To counter these patterns, Hernández and Munz review existing gender-sensitive reporting principles, including checklists that ask who sources are, whether double standards and stereotypes appear, whether loaded language sways opinion, and whether stories are contextualized. Yusuf’s do and don’t principles urge journalists to provide relevant background information, balance representation of men and women as sources, mention the social roots of gender violence and society’s responsibility, and include local contact information for support organizations. UN Women’s guidance on gender and age-sensitive media reporting adds recommendations on survivor-centred representation, intersectional lenses, journalist training, and dedicated spaces for human-rights-related news. The authors note that thematic framing—which links violence to larger social and structural contexts—raises audience awareness and promotes social response in ways episodic framing cannot.

Building on these guidelines, the scholars advance space-making as a praxis-based framework for more humane and socially responsive journalism. Originally conceptualized in critical communication pedagogy, space-making encourages people to see the world differently and challenge status quo conceptions, deeply held beliefs, values, and ways of thinking. Applied to journalism, it asks reporters to examine how their reporting practices reproduce inequity, connect individual cases to systemic conditions, and create opportunities for survivors and communities to exercise voice and agency. Space-making intentionally foregrounds cultural context, structure, and intent as a starting point, calling on journalists to reflexively interrogate how their practices recreate discursive violence in covering gender violence.

The framework draws on ethical witnessing, which involves three points of interaction: the agent who bears witness, the utterance or moment itself, and the audience who witnesses. Peters describes witnessing as an intricately tangled process raising fundamental questions of communication—truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying. Tait and others argue that bearing witness provides a rationale for journalistic practice because it should incite public response, an ethos of response-ability that encourages shared responsibility for the suffering of others. Feminist media witnessing networks, as Rentschler documents, create crucial spaces of justice for victims and survivors, bolster their credibility, and facilitate social change by connecting coverage to social movements and networks of care.

To illustrate how space-making operates in practice, the authors analyze news coverage surrounding the 2021 murder of Gabby Petito, who was reported missing during a trip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. The case received hyperfocused media attention and saturated public discourse, amplified by social media, documentaries, and armchair investigators. A content analysis found that the disappearance of women of color around the same time resulted in fewer words per story, fewer stories, and less coverage overall compared to Petito’s disappearance. The authors contend that this hyperfocus on a young white woman washed out other news stories and dominated headlines at the expense of coverage of violence against women of color, trans women, and other minoritized communities—a phenomenon known as missing white woman syndrome. They stress that Petito’s case should have been covered, but that articles could have linked her story to other cases of missing women of color, highlighted structural factors that obscure resources dedicated to finding missing women, and utilized thematic framing to call attention to social causes of such violence.

Space-making builds on intersectionality as a guiding analytic, drawing on Crenshaw’s seminal work to uncover complex, systematic prejudices related to race, ethnicity, class, ability, gender, and religion. The authors point to investigative journalists like Kent Patterson, who revisits stories of violence against women because the issues are not just a headline for one day, and Connie Walker, who stresses that women are more than the violence inflicted upon them. Journalism about gender violence, they argue, should balance coverage of violent acts with larger conversations about resistance, change, and anti-violence efforts, honoring the strength and resilience that survivors hold.

Ultimately, Hernández and Munz conclude that reflexive, relational, and intersectional reporting can strengthen journalism’s democratic role, improve representations of gender violence, and support collective witnessing and social change. They acknowledge critiques that existing media guidelines face questions of development, acceptability, uptake, and effectiveness, particularly in local contexts and across all forms of media, and that gaps persist between academic scholarship and practitioner implementation. Still, they advocate for space-making as one praxis-based solution that responds to Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality and peace, justice, and strong institutions. While their approach is influenced by US journalistic concepts and case examples, they contend there are meaningful implications for international contexts, and that journalists, practitioners, and scholars alike can utilize their training in discourse, structures, patterns, and systems to address wicked problems and enable social change.

Subject of Research: Media Ethics and Communication Research

Article Title: Wicked problems, gender violence, and media ethics: Reflections on improving journalistic coverage of violence against women and girls

Article References: Hernández, L. H., & Munz, S. (2026). Wicked problems, gender violence, and media ethics: Reflections on improving journalistic coverage of violence against women and girls. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1759634. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1759634

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1759634

Keywords: journalism ethics, gender violence, media framing, intersectionality, wicked problems, Gabby Petito, witnessing, Wicked, problems, gender, violence, media