Monday, April 20, 2026

Pediatric Investigation study uncovers the link between academic burnout, internet gaming, and depression

Researchers examined how academic burnout can lead to increased internet gaming and depression in Chinese adolescents

Pediatric Investigation

Does academic burnout and consequent depression lead to online gaming addiction? — image:
Chinese researchers report that burnout from academia can push teens towards excessive online gaming. This study strengthens the claim that depressive symptoms and negative attentional bias mediate the relationship between academic burnout and adolescent internet gaming disorder. Teens, when academically stressed become emotionally drained, develop negative thinking, and turn to internet gaming to seek solace, which reduces their capability to handle real-life situations.
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Credit: circulating on Flickr Image Source Link: https://openverse.org/image/e1109847-44ee-4928-9080-3612d050f3bf?q=teen+computer+game&p=27

China’s highly competitive education system is known for its strict evaluation, rigorous intensity, and academic pressure. A recent study has highlighted the growing problem of this academic pressure leading to burnout amongst Chinese adolescents, which is pushing them towards online gaming. While earlier studies were able to prove the association between academic burnout and behavioral addictions, this study shed light on how academic burnout may lead to internet gaming disorder (IGD), and explains how depression and negative attention work in a chain reaction to increase the overall risk.

To this end, a research team led by Professor Liping Jia and Professor Guohua Lu from the Department of Psychology at Shandong Second Medical School, China, conducted extensive research with over 2,000 students in Grades 7 to 9. According to the study, students dealing with academic burnout often turned to internet gaming as a distraction and a form of self-validation. Published online on March 24, 2026 in the Pediatric Investigation journal, the study emphasized that while internet gaming offers a sense of instant achievement, this temporary feeling can quickly turn into dependence. It focused on the need for specified prevention strategies to lower IGD and improve the mental health condition of Chinese teens.

The study found that depression in teens is a major factor that connects academic burnout and IGD, and students who are burnt out are more likely to experience low motivation and despair in day-to-day life activities. Because of these emotional difficulties, students turn to internet gaming as a coping mechanism. “According to our research, academic burnout activates internal psychological pathways in adolescents, with affective factors, particularly depressive symptoms, playing a central mediating role in IGD. Adolescents experiencing burnout are more likely to make negative attributions about their learning and self-worth, thereby triggering or exacerbating depressive symptoms,” says Prof. Jia.

In addition to depression, another important factor is the negative attention bias that mediates the relationship between academic burnout and adolescent IGD. Specifically, higher levels of academic burnout were associated with stronger negative attentional bias, which in turn predicted greater IGD severity. One plausible explanation could be that academic burnout, as a chronic state of psychological exhaustion, weakens attentional control and enhances the processing of negative information and attentional bias, rendering individuals more sensitive to failure-related or aversive cues.

This study strengthens the claim that depressive symptoms and negative attentional bias mediate the relationship between academic burnout and adolescent IGD. “Teens, when they feel academically stressed and become emotionally drained, develop negative thinking, and turn to internet gaming to seek solace, which reduces their capability to handle real-life situations. This cycle continues and leads to increased IGD,” explains Prof. Lu.

The researchers found that understanding this mechanism is important to design targeted prevention strategies for adolescents under academic stress. Schools can organize mental health check-up camps and counseling sessions for teens struggling with IGD to help reduce academic stress and create a more balanced learning environment. The researchers also found that evidence-based programs, including stress management and positive psychology courses, could further strengthen students’ resilience and emotion-regulation abilities. High-risk students could benefit from therapy sessions and group-based stress-reduction programs. Importantly, attentional bias modification training can help redirect adolescents’ attentional resources toward positive information, thereby reducing the influence of negative affect of gaming behavior and lowering the risk of IGD.

The researchers state that further long-term research is needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms behind the negative impact of academic stress and internet gaming on teens. Addiction to internet gaming in teens is strongly related to stress, attention-related issues, and mental health challenges, and as the pressure of better performance in academics increases, it becomes even more important to look beyond just the screen time and address these deeper issues.

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Reference
DOI: 10.1002/ped4.70052

About Professor Guohua Lu from Shandong Second Medical University, China
Dr. Guohua Lu is a Professor at the Department of Psychology, Shandong Second Medical University, China. She is currently a Standing Director of the Shandong Psychological Society. Her expertise lies in the domains of applied and clinical psychology as well as psychological crisis intervention. Prof. Lu has published over 80 academic papers in reputed journals and has been honored with several awards felicitating her contribution to research.

Journal

Pediatric Investigation

DOI

10.1002/ped4.70052

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Academic burnout and internet gaming disorder in Chinese adolescents: The chain mediating roles of depressive symptoms and negative attentional bias

Feeling good, feeling free – autonomy the key to happiness, says SFU study

Simon Fraser University

If you can’t get no satisfaction, then maybe it’s because happiness does not only stem from pleasure or a meaningful existence. Instead, a new Simon Fraser University study suggests that freedom is the key to happiness.

Researchers found that while positive feelings and pleasure are important, autonomy and the freedom to make your own choices is a better gauge of happiness.

“People are not merely hedonists,” says Jason Payne, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology.

“When people step back and evaluate whether their life is going well, they consider more than their emotional balance sheet. They appear to ask themselves not just ‘do I feel good?’, but also ‘am I free?’”

Unlocking the secret to happiness has been the subject of debate since time immemorial. Experts usually suggest that happiness stems from:

Feeling good (affective experiences): more pleasure and less pain means a better life.

Meaningful existence (flourishing): happiness comes from many factors, including good relationships, competence, virtue, autonomy, personal growth.

The study, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, sought to put these two schools of thought to the test by surveying more than 1,200 adults from Canada and the United Kingdom.

The survey measured people’s positive and negative feelings, their life satisfaction and three psychological traits: autonomy – the feeling of being free to make choices; competence – feeling effective and capable; relatedness – feeling close and connected to others.

Researchers then used advanced statistical modelling to determine what influences people’s satisfaction.

Unsurprisingly, positive and negative emotions were strong indicators of happiness. But autonomy – the sense that you are free to make your own choices – was a better indicator of life satisfaction.

“Even after accounting for how good or bad people felt, those who felt more autonomous were more satisfied with their lives,” says Payne.

“Autonomy was the only psychological need that seems to contribute something that feelings alone did not explain.”

Aside from challenging widespread assumptions about happiness, the findings also have practical implications for the workplace, as well as public policy, according to Payne.

“Programs and interventions designed to improve well-being may succeed in improving feelings, but if they restrict people’s choices, then they could ultimately backfire and lead people to judge their lives as worse overall,” says Payne.

“For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the obligatory facemasks may well have been in the public good, but by making them involuntary, perhaps that explains some of the backlash as they impinged upon people’s feeling of autonomy.

“Policymakers looking to improve well-being should be mindful not only of potential direct outcomes, but also the second-order effects of not being free to choose the path to those outcomes.”

DOI

10.1080/17439760.2026.2651076

Bath researchers join £6.7M program to tackle global health challenges

University of Bath

Two researchers from the University of Bath have been awarded funding from the Academy of Medical Sciences, as part of a £6.7 million programme to test new ideas in tackling the global health challenges of Type 2 diabetes and antimicrobial resistance.

Dr Íris Luz Batalha from the Department of Life Sciences and Dr Maria Shchepinova from the Department of Chemistry are two of only 55 researchers from across the UK to receive these awards.

Delivered through the Academy’s flagship Springboard programme, the grants support curiosity-driven, discovery-stage research – the foundational science that underpins future treatments and interventions.

The awards support researchers to take their first steps as independent group leaders, testing bold ideas with the potential to improve lives, reduce health inequalities and strengthen the UK’s long-term research base.

Now in its eleventh year, Springboard supports researchers at a critical point in their careers, when many are establishing laboratories for the first time and need the freedom to explore ambitious questions.

Tackling antibiotic resistance through targeted drug release

In the University’s Department of Life Sciences, Dr Íris Luz Batalha is developing a pioneering technology to transform the treatment of life-threatening infections.

Her project, CellScan, addresses the critical challenge of antimicrobial resistance by moving away from high-dose, systemic antibiotics that can damage healthy tissue and encourage antimicrobial resistance.

The project aims to create a precision-targeted therapy by engineering nanoparticles that act as biosensors. These drug-containing particles will be designed to detect the metabolic fingerprints that infected cells naturally display on their surface and release medication exactly where it is needed. This approach offers a universal platform for localised drug delivery that could be adapted to treat a wide range of infections across diverse patient populations.

Dr Batalha said: “I am incredibly grateful for this support from the Academy of Medical Sciences, which allows us to tackle one of the most pressing health challenges of our time: antimicrobial resistance.

“Most of us have experienced the toll of a severe bacterial infection, or have watched someone we care about struggle, or even die, because of one.

“Unfortunately, this is not a problem that is going away; bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to the antibiotics we have, and we desperately need new ways of fighting back.

“For too long, our approach to treating an infection has been a bit like setting off an alarm for a whole city when we really just need a quiet knock on the right door.

“Our bodies already have a remarkable way of flagging infected cells by sending out specific ‘SOS’ signals.

“With CellScan, we are building the technology to recognise these unique chemical signatures and deliver help directly.

“By ensuring the right drug dose reaches the right place at the right time, we can reduce side effects and give bacteria fewer chances to develop resistance. My hope is that this research leads to treatments that are not only more effective, but also much kinder to the patients who need them.”

Understanding why the drugs don’t work

Dr Maria Shchepinova, from the University’s Department of Chemistry has also been awarded funding for her project, which investigates why some treatments for Type 2 diabetes (T2D) don’t work for everyone.

Type 2 diabetes is a growing health crisis affecting around 10% of people aged 20-79 across the world. Leading T2D drugs, such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, work by targeting specific cell surface proteins called GPCRs. However, these drugs can cause side-effects and require painful injections, whereas many similar drugs work inconsistently between patients or fail in trials. The Springboard Award will explore a novel perspective on why this happens.

Dr Shchepinova, said: “In T2D, oxidative cellular damage called lipid peroxidation creates harmful substances that permanently stick to proteins in cell membranes, right where the GPCRs reside.

“This project will reveal whether lipid peroxidation alters GPCR function, causing the drugs to fail.

“Ultimately, this will guide smarter, personalized therapies tailored to an individual’s level of cellular oxidative damage.

“I’m beyond thrilled and honoured to get the Springboard Award at such a defining moment in my career.

“I am grateful to the University of Bath, the AMS panel, and the reviewers for believing in my idea and supporting me in so many ways – through resources, mentorship, visibility and networking. This is truly incredible. Thank you!”

Turning ideas into impactful research

The awards are supported by the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Wellcome and the British Heart Foundation, and give early career researchers the time and flexibility to turn promising ideas into impactful research.

Professor James Naismith FRS FRSE FMedSci, Vice President (Non-Clinical) at the Academy of Medical Sciences, said: “The transition to research leadership is one of the most challenging stages in a research career, yet it is also when creativity is often at its strongest.

“Springboard invests in people at the moment when bold ideas begin to take shape, providing the freedom, confidence and backing researchers need to strike out on their own and ask big questions.

“The projects announced today show the impact this approach can have – demonstrating how early support can translate into meaningful benefits for patients, communities and the wider health system.”

UK Science Minister Lord Vallance FMedSci said: “To tackle cruel diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and chronic pain, and ultimately save lives, we must help researchers to take their ambitious discovery-stage work to the next level.

“This support is backing researchers at a stage where attracting commercial investment can be a challenge and builds on the Government’s record investment in research – unlocking more discoveries that benefit people across the UK and beyond.”

Bottled lightning makes a cleaner fuel

Bursts of plasma convert methane into methanol without high heat and pressures

Northwestern University

Northwestern University chemists have discovered a new way to turn natural gas into liquid fuel — and it’s lightning in a bottle.

By harnessing tiny bursts of plasma — or mini “lightning bolts” — in glass tubes submerged in water, the team has successfully converted methane directly into methanol in a single step. Methanol is a versatile, high-demand industrial chemical used to make many products people use every day. It also is commonly used as an industrial solvent and is gaining attention as a cleaner-burning fuel for ships and industrial boilers.

The method bypasses the extreme heat and high pressures required for current industrial processes, which blast apart methane and rebuild it as methanol in a multi-step process. While the current method is reliable, it’s energy intensive and emits millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year globally.

Using just electricity, water and a copper-oxide catalyst, the new process could offer a cleaner, electrified path to producing one of the world’s most widely used chemical building blocks.

The study will be published on Wednesday (April 15) in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“We’re using pulses of high-voltage electricity,” said Northwestern’s Dayne Swearer, the study’s corresponding author. “If the electrical potential is high enough, lightning bolts form inside of our reactor the way they do during a summer thunderstorm. We’re taking advantage of that chemistry to break methane’s bonds without heating the entire system to extreme temperatures.”

Swearer is an assistant professor of chemistry at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. He also is a member of the International Institute of Nanotechnology, Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy and the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Scientific and Engineering Excellence.

Ripping and rebuilding

One of the world’s most used commodity chemicals, methanol is a key ingredient in plastics, paints and adhesives. More recently, researchers have explored methanol as a promising liquid fuel because its combustion produces lower sulfur emissions and particulate pollution than gasoline and diesel.

Currently, industry generates methanol through a multi-step process, starting with steam reforming. First, methane is reacted with steam at temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Celsius to break it into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Then, those gases are recombined under extremely high pressures — 200 to 300 times standard atmospheric pressure — to form methanol. Tearing methane apart and rebuilding it consumes an enormous amount of heat and inherently generates carbon dioxide along the way.

“The extreme temperatures are needed to break the unreactive chemical bonds between carbon and hydrogen in methane,” Swearer said. “Then, you must use high pressure to squeeze all those molecules together onto the catalyst in order to make the methanol molecule. It works, but it’s not the most straightforward path to making methanol from methane.”

Replacing heat with plasma

While researchers have long sought a more energy-efficient, single-step solution, they have struggled to overcome two challenges. Methane is unusually stable and difficult to break apart, requiring extreme reaction conditions. Then, once methanol is formed, it continues to react, rapidly degrading into carbon dioxide. So, the challenge lies in not just starting the reaction but stopping it at exactly the right moment.

To overcome these issues, Swearer and his team turned to plasma, a highly energized state of matter filled with fast-moving, “hot” electrons. Most people might be familiar with plasma as the type of matter that makes up the sun or lightning bolts. Those are examples of hot plasmas. Swearer’s group works primarily with cold plasmas, in which the gas molecules’ temperature is closer to room temperature, but the electrons are selectively heated to temperatures that can exceed tens of thousands of degrees.

“More than 99% of the observable universe is comprised of plasma,” said James Ho, a Ph.D. candidate in Swearer’s lab and the study’s first author. “But even though it’s ubiquitous, it really is an untapped resource in the field of chemistry. The reason we use cold plasmas is because we can produce them at low temperatures and normal atmospheric pressure conditions.”

For the new single-step process, Ho built a plasma “bubble reactor,” which is essentially a porous glass tube coated with a copper oxide catalyst. Then, the team flowed methane gas through the tube while applying electrical pulses. The electricity transformed the methane gas into plasma, splitting methane and water into highly reactive fragments. Those fragments then recombined to form methanol, which immediately dissolves into the surrounding water. That rapid “quenching” stopped the chemical reaction at the right moment, preventing the methane from decomposing into carbon dioxide.

Enhancing with argon

To further enhance the process, the team diluted methane with argon, which is typically an inert noble gas. But, after ionizing argon in the plasma, the chemists discovered it became an active and reactive participant in the chemical process, increasing electron density within the plasma and reducing unwanted byproducts.

Under the optimized conditions with argon present, the system demonstrated 96.8% methanol selectivity in the liquid mixture. In other words, of all the liquid products formed in the process, it was mostly methanol. And, of all the products formed — both gas and liquid — about 57% ended up as methanol.

“We also ended up with ethylene, which is a precursor to plastic production, and hydrogen gas, which is an important commodity chemical and a zero-carbon fuel in its own right,” Swearer said. “So, we took methane, which is a very abundant gas, and turned it into methanol along with ethylene, hydrogen and a bit of propane. These are all intrinsically more valuable products.”

Toward smaller, distributed systems

If scaled, the plasma-driven system could enable smaller, distributed facilities that use electricity to convert methane into liquid fuels.

“We could treat stranded resources, like leaky well heads that naturally emit methane into the environment,” Swearer said. “Right now, the way to deal with leaked methane is to light it on fire to turn it into carbon dioxide, which warms the climate less than methane but is still clearly a problem. Instead, we could take a smaller scale reactor to the place that’s leaking methane and turn it into a transportable liquid fuel.”

Next, Swearer and his team plan to optimize the system further and explore ways to efficiently recover and separate methanol as a purified product.

The study, “Direct partial oxidation of methane at plasma-catalyst-liquid interfaces,” was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (award number DE-SC0024540), the U.S. Army DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office (award number W911NF-25-1-0026) and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.