Introduction: To explore the predictive effect of effort–reward imbalance on students' learning engagement and to elucidate the underlying mechanism, 796 students were selected for a survey.Methods: The participants were required to complete four scales: the Effort-reward Imbalance Scale, the Learning Engagement Scale, the Learned Helplessness Questionnaire, and the Perceived Social Support Scale.Results: (1) Students' effort–reward imbalance significantly and negatively predicts their learning engagement; (2) Learned helplessness serves as a mediator in the relationship between students' effort–reward imbalance and learning engagement; (3) Social support plays a moderating role in the association between effort–reward imbalance and learned helplessness. High levels of social support can buffer the impact of an effort–reward imbalance on learned helplessness, and the protective effect of social support is more obvious when the effort–reward imbalance is low.Discussion: The present study revealed how an effort–reward imbalance affects learning engagement among students through the dimensions of learned helplessness and perceived social support. The constructed model not only further clarifies the mechanism underlying the relationship between effort–reward imbalance and learning engagement but also holds significant implications for guiding students' education.

Although effort-reward imbalance has been proven to affect academic burnout, how effort-reward imbalance affects academic burnout remains unclear. This study, from the perspective of learning satisfaction and resilience, investigates how effort-reward imbalance affects academic burnout and reveals the influence of effort-reward imbalance on academic burnout. A sample of 755 junior high school students was assessed using the Revised Effort-Reward Imbalance for Learning Scale, Revised Learning Satisfaction Scale, Academic Burnout Scale, and Resilience Scale. Junior high school students’ effort-reward imbalance rates for learning, learning satisfaction, and academic burnout were all significantly correlated with each other; learning satisfaction mediated the relationship between them. Learning satisfaction mediated the relationship between junior high school students’ effort-reward imbalance rate for learning and academic burnout, and resilience negatively moderated the path from junior high school students’ effort-reward imbalance rate from learning to learning satisfaction. The results suggest that improving students’ resilience can effectively decrease the negative effects of effort-reward imbalance.

The ordinal position effect posits that items positioned earlier in an ordinal sequence are responded to faster with the left key than the right key, and items positioned later in an ordinal sequence are responded to faster with the right key than the left key. Although the mechanism of the ordinal position effect has been investigated in many studies, it is unclear whether the ordinal position effect can extend to the auditory modality and the hands crossed context. Therefore, the present study employed days as the order information to investigate this question. Days were visually or acoustically displayed on a screen in random order, and participants were instructed to judge whether the probe day they perceived was before or after the current day (days-relevant task) or to identify the color or voice of the probe day they perceived (days-irrelevant task). The results indicate the following: (a) The days before the current day were responded to faster with the left key than the right key, and the days after the current day were responded to faster with the right key than the left key, both when the days-relevant task and the days-irrelevant task were performed, regardless of the sense modality. (b) The ordinal position effect for judgments of days was also obtained in the auditory modality even when the hands were crossed. These results indicate that the ordinal position effect can extend to the auditory modality and the hands crossed context, similar to the spatial-numerical association of response codes effect of numbers.

How people encode numbers in the context of multiple overlapping encoded cues remains unclear. In this study, we explored Chinese finger numbers, which contain both a numerical magnitude cue and a left-right hand cue offered by the expressing hand, to investigate the number encoding mechanism in the context of multiple overlapping cues. Chinese finger numbers expressed by the left or right hand were randomly and centrally presented on a computer screen to participants who were asked to perform a hand classification task (Experiment 1), a magnitude classification task (Experiment 2), a parity classification task (Experiment 3) and a magnitude classification or ring classification task (Experiment 4). We discovered (a) only an association effect between the pressed key and the expressing hand in hand classification and parity classification tasks, (b) the SNARC effect only on the magnitude classification task, (c) the association effect between the pressed key and the expressing hand on the larger, Chinese finger number, magnitude classification task in Experiment 2, and (d) the SNARC effect and the association between the pressed key and the expressing hand were reversed on the ring classification task. From these results, we concluded that people can flexibly choose appropriate number encoding cues and how numbers are encoded in the context of multiple overlapping cues depending on (a) which cognition task individuals perform and (b) the character of the numbers involved.