Social networking site smartphone applications have been widely used among Chinese young adults. However, less is known about their effects on emotional health and the mechanisms through which they function. This study analyzes the relationship between college students’ smartphone social networking service use patterns, social gratification, social media self-control failure, and emotional health. Data was collected from 360 college students in China via application log tracking and a self-administered questionnaire. Structural equation modeling results showed that, after controlling for demographic variables, the use of video social networking site smartphone applications was associated with decreased social gratification, and ultimately, adverse emotional health. Using social networking site smartphone applications late at night exhibited worse emotional health via more social media self-control failure. The implications for designing and using social media applications are discussed.

With the development of social media, some individuals who have a great influence on the Internet have become opinion leaders, which means that the traditional agenda-setting theory cannot explain the mechanism of social consensus generation in the social media era. Therefore, the individual agenda is a new perspective to studying social consensus and personal influence in social media. This study defined the concept of the “individual agenda,” and conducted an empirical study on the relationship between the media agenda, the opinion leaders’ agenda, and the individual agenda, based on 71.77 million tweets sampled from the Twitter platform in 2015 with the approach of topic modeling. This study found that (1) most individual agendas are not consistent with the traditional public agenda, and the intrapersonal issue salience is highly related to the interpersonal issue salience; therefore, the concept of “individual agenda” has been validated empirically; (2) the media agenda has a significant positive correlation with 30.3% of the individual agendas, which means that professional media influences only a small number of individuals; and (3) the opinion leaders’ agenda has no significant correlation with the media agenda, while it has a significant positive correlation with 31.1% of the individual agendas, which means that opinion leaders have become strong competitors of traditional professional media in agenda-setting. This study also discussed the relationship between individual agenda-setting and public agenda-setting and the potential research directions in the future.

This paper analyzes the media frames adopted by the official WeChat and Sina Weibo accounts of the People’s Daily between January 1 and December 31, 2020, for reports about female medical personnel involved in pandemic prevention and control. Although the number of female medical personnel involved in pandemic prevention and control far exceeded that of their male counterparts, the extent of media reports on the former was far less than that of the latter. The human interest frame about female medical personnel was mainly applied, while the use of the action frame was less frequent, which highlighted the gender identity and family role of these women but weakened their professional identity. This was not conducive to praising the contributions of female medical personnel in fighting the pandemic. The media frames of reporting medical personnel in WeChat and Sina Weibo accounts of the People’s Daily are not always the same. After Wuhan’s lockdown ended on April 8, the proportion of the human interest frame of the report text of female medical personnel decreased, and the proportion of the action frame increased, while the proportion of the human interest frame of the report text of male medical personnel increased and the proportion of the action frame decreased. Previous studies mainly analyzed the use of the media frames of female news personalities, but few studies focused on whether women had the possibility of breaking away from the gender media frames. This study shows that some female medical personnel with exceptional professional competence are likely to transcend the gender media frames and receive similar coverage to that of male medical professionals, like Li Lanjuan and Chen Wei.

Young people are increasingly using social networking site (SNS) smartphone applications (apps), necessitating research on the effects of such use on the users’ emotional health. The present study recruited 360 college students across mainland China and recorded their smartphone usage for one week using an automatic tracking app. Surveys assessing social support perception and emotional health were subsequently conducted. The study examined the relationship between SNS smartphone app usage (frequency and duration) and emotional health, as well as the moderating role of perceived social support in SNS smartphone usage and emotional health. Among individuals with high social support, SNS smartphone use was more strongly associated with better emotional health. These results suggest conditional benefits of using SNS smartphone apps, depending on the user's perceived social support. The implications for designing and using SNS smartphone apps are also discussed.

The study use crawler to get 842,917 hot tweets written in English with keyword Chinese or China. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis are used to explore the tweets. Thirty topics are extracted. Overall, 33% of the tweets relate to politics, and 20% relate to economy, 21% relate to culture, and 26% relate to society. Regarding the polarity, 55% of the tweets are positive, 31% are negative and the other 14% are neutral. There are only 25.3% of the tweets with obvious sentiment, most of them are joy.