Growth mindset and grit have attracted much attention in educational research recently. Yet the underlying mechanisms that relate these variables to each other as well as to other variables remain largely unclear. This study investigates the relationships among growth mindset, learning motivations, and grit. We recruited a total of 1,842 students (884 males and 958 females) from third to ninth grade in a Chinese city. Results from the structural equation model analyzing the students’ responses showed that learning motivations partially mediate the relationship between growth mindset and grit. Specifically, intrinsic motivation and identified regulation of extrinsic motivation are positively associated with growth mindset and grit, while external regulation of extrinsic motivation is negatively associated with them. Additionally, introjected regulation of extrinsic motivation is uncorrelated with these two variables. This study furthers the understanding of the underlying mechanisms through which growth mindset and grit positively impact education.

Positive education aims to improve students’ academic performance as well as their well-being and character strengths. In contrast to traditional school counseling methods that are typically post hoc and pathological, positive education advocates a preventive and positive approach, which teaches students well-being skills that can reduce the chances of depression before it occurs. The current study tested this hypothesis by using a pseudo-experiment design. Six 8th grade classes (N = 173) in a Chinese school were randomly assigned into two groups. In the experiment group, students took positive education courses once a week that taught them primarily knowledge and skills related to positive emotions. Students in the control group took regular moral education courses. After one semester, the level of depression of students in the experiment group had no significant change while that of students in the control group increased significantly. The results showed that adolescent depression can be prevented by positive emotion interventions. Implications and limitations are discussed.

The relationship between Socio-economic factors and morality remains controversial. Previous research has found that wealth makes people unethical, while other research suggests that poverty is a good predictor of unethical behavior. The relationship between other social factors is also ambiguous. In the current study, the relationship between socio-economic indicators reported by the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China and moral motivation revealed from online social networking, Sina Weibo was constructed. Using data from the whole year of 2013 Sina Weibo microblogs, we found that the poor and rich areas were more willing to behave immorally, and the relation between GDP and collective moral motivation was curved. Also, normal people were less ethical when prices increased than when incomes decreased. Ecological construction and the value added by industries which used more farmers and off-farm workers were both correlated with morality. We also found a dark side to science and technological innovation, which harmed collective morality when areas grew richer. But all the results we found were correlational, more casual lab experiments were needed in future research.

Over the past decade, major cities in China have suffered from severe air pollution, which is also known as smog. Despite lay considerations that smog might pose risks for psychopathology, it remains unknown whether it is only linked to affective psychopathology or to a broader range of symptomologies. Moreover, whether individual differences in emotion regulation, a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology, would influence the magnitude of pollution-induced symptoms is not well understood. Using a longitudinal design, the current study measured trait emotion regulation and psychopathological symptoms in a sample of university students at Time 1 (without smog, N = 120) and then reassessed for psychopathology at Time 2 (after acute exposure to smog for 1 week, N = 102). The results showed that participants had higher levels of positive symptom distress, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, and psychoticism at Time 2. Moreover, reappraisal is negatively associated with smog-induced elevations in psychopathological symptoms only when participants rely heavily on suppression. We discuss the implications of this investigation for both intervention efforts and future work on the contextual factors surrounding the deployment of emotion regulation strategies.