The continuous improvement of transportation infrastructure is an important support for achieving high-quality development, while the high-quality characteristics of development will inevitably promote the process of economic and social sustainability. From the dual perspectives of economic transformation and people’s social livelihoods, we regard the opening of a high-speed railway (HSR) in China’s cities as a quasi-natural experiment, and utilize the difference-in-difference (DID) method to examine the impact of improved transportation infrastructure on the high-quality development of prefecture-level cities and its action mechanism. This study is the first to incorporate HSR openings and environmental regulation into the same framework, focusing on the high-quality development problem of cities. The empirical results reveal that: (1) the opening of an HSR can advance industrial structure upgrading and increase social employment level, thereby promoting the high-quality development of cities; (2) the intensity of environmental regulation is an important action mechanism that affects such relationships, but it presents two different influences on an HSR’s industrial effect and employment effect, that is, inhibition and reinforcement, respectively; and (3) urban heterogeneity tests illustrate that an HSR opening plays a more significant role in promoting the high-quality development of China’s eastern region cities and non-resource-based cities. Our findings are beneficial to improve the effectiveness and accuracy of decision-makers’ investment in transportation infrastructure as well as to facilitate the benign interaction between the national HSR policy and local environmental regulation strategies, thereby achieving the high-quality and sustainable development of urban economy and society.

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We explored the impact of admiration of others regarding their morality, positive attitude, and skills on the fatigue of social media users through the mediators of social media loneliness and social media anxiety. We collected data for analysis from 688 social media users through an online survey. The results show that admiration for morality relieved social media fatigue through the mediator of social media loneliness, and admiration for positive attitude relieved social media fatigue through the mediators of both social media loneliness and social media anxiety. However, admiration for skill aggravated social media anxiety and, further, led to social media fatigue. Admiration for morality and for positive attitude could directly relieve social media fatigue, but admiration for skill led to social media fatigue only when it was transformed into social media anxiety. Our findings have implications for ways to relieve social media fatigue.

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