This research investigated the relationships between school climates and bullying behaviors in Chinese adolescents, and tested the mediating effect of prosocial tendency according to the seesaw effect. School climates were operationalized using three constructs: subjective diversity of student development goals, teacher support, and peer trust. Bullying behaviors included traditional (i.e., physical, nonphysical, and relational) and cyber bullying behaviors. We recruited 538 adolescents from three schools in Beijing, China (286 girls, 252 boys; average age = 12.47) and asked them to fill out the surveys measuring school climates and prosocial tendency at the outset and to report school bullying behaviors three months later. The results showed that subjective diversity of student development goals and peer trust were directly associated with less cyber bullying behavior. Moreover, teacher support and peer trust were indirectly associated with less traditional bullying behaviors via prosocial tendency. Our findings extend the existing literature on the relationships between school climates and bullying behaviors by incorporating different types of bullying behaviors, concentrating on Chinese adolescents from a cultural viewpoint, and tapping into the underlying mechanism via revealing prosocial tendency as a mediator. Theoretical and empirical contributions of this study, as well as practical implications are discussed.

In this study, health risk attitude and health locus of control were included as dispositional factors in the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to explain people’s protective behavior in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical data involved two waves of data with a sample of 526 adults with full-time jobs from Beijing, China, and structural equation model results confirmed a partial successful extension of the PMT. Specifically, health risk attitude had a direct effect on citizens’ protective behavior, but without an indirect effect mediated by threat appraisal toward the COVID-19 pandemic; health locus of control did not directly associate with citizens’ protective behavior, but had an indirect effect on it fully via coping appraisal toward the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the PMT has been extended by adding a distal dispositional factor on the impact of coping appraisal on protective behavior. Implications for advancing the government’s anti-epidemic strategy are discussed.

Negativity bias in online reading widely occurs and leads to harmful results at the individual and social levels, but few studies have examined how to reduce this bias from the perspective of lexical processing. This study examined whether and how high lexical construal levels decrease negativity bias through a recognition memory experiment (Study 1) and an eye-tracking experiment (Study 2). In Study 1 (N = 70), results showed a negativity bias in recognition memory, which was attenuated under high construal levels, primarily through a reduction in the discrimination sensitivity (A’) advantage for negative words. In Study 2 (N = 53), eye-tracking revealed that at low construal levels, negative words were processed more quickly than positive words, indicating automated processing. Critically, at high construal levels, this pattern reversed, with positive words being processed more efficiently. These findings demonstrate that high lexical construal levels reduce negativity bias not by equalizing processing, but by attenuating the automatic advantage for negative words and shifting efficiency toward positive information.