Digital Self-harm refers to individuals anonymously posting, sending, or sharing harmful content about themselves online. As a self-injurious behavior in the virtual space, Digital Self-harm has gradually attracted the attention of researchers. Based on the existing literature, this paper clarifies the concept of Digital Self-harm, sorts out the influencing factors of Digital Self-harm, and constructs an "endpoint theoretical model" of Digital Self-harm, and explains the mechanism of Digital Self-harm from three processes: distal, intermediate, and proximal. At present, the research on Digital Self-harm in China is still weak, and in the future, it is necessary to carry out in-depth research on the localization of Digital Self-harm, verify the endpoint theoretical model through empirical research, and enrich the research methods.

In the digital era, tourism promotion has shifted to short videos, and tourism marketers increasingly collaborate with short-video influencers for promotional purposes. Bloggers exhibit different levels of emotional expression intensity in their videos. As tourism is a hedonic experience, blogger emotions significantly influence travel intention. Following the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM), this research examines how strong emotional expressions affect travel intentions and whether individual emotional susceptibility moderates this relationship. By integrating behavioral and EEG data, the study fills a research gap by revealing how high-intensity affect triggers consumer approach motivation through psychological and neural pathways, offering new insights into the emotional mechanisms of social media persuasion.
The study used a multi-method design with two experiments. Experiment 1 employed a 2 (emotional intensity: strong vs. weak) × 2 (emotional susceptibility: high vs. low) between-subjects design with 223 participants. Intensity was manipulated in the video using vocal tone, music, and facial expressions of the bloggers. Experiment 2 further provided neural evidence using an EEG mixed design with 47 participants. Frontal Alpha Asymmetry (FAA) was recorded at F3 and F4 electrodes to objectively measure approach motivation. By combining subjective self-reports from behavioral scales with objective neurophysiological signals, the research ensured high validity.
Data analysis yielded significant results across behavioral and neural levels. Experiment 1 showed a significant main effect of emotional intensity, where strong expressions led to higher self-reported travel intentions. Crucially, a significant interaction was found: this effect was only significant for participants with high emotional susceptibility, while low-susceptibility individuals remained unaffected. Experiment 2 replicated these patterns using EEG data. High-intensity emotional expressions triggered significantly higher FAA indices, indicating stronger approach motivation toward the destination. Similar to behavioral results, the interaction between emotional intensity and susceptibility was significant for FAA. These consistent findings confirm the strong effect of emotional cues, particularly for audiences naturally sensitive to emotional information.
In conclusion, emotional expression intensity is a fundamental driver of travel intention in short videos. Strong emotional displays act as heuristic cues that facilitate emotional contagion, allowing viewers to adopt the blogger’s positive affect which further enhances their travel intention. Furthermore, individual emotional susceptibility serves as a critical boundary condition for this effect. While high-intensity expressions generally promote travel intention, their impact is significantly enhanced among consumers with higher level of emotional susceptibility. In summary, travel intention formation is an affect-driven process, where strong emotional intensity triggers biological and behavioral responses in consumers with high susceptibility.
These findings offer practical guidance for bloggers, marketers, and platforms. Bloggers should maintain a high-energy, passionate state to maximize their persuasive impact, as enthusiastic delivery is more effective than neutral reporting. Tourism marketers should prioritize collaborations with influencers who possess strong emotional vitality. Additionally, platform managers can optimize recommendation algorithms to identify consumers with high emotional susceptibility based on historical browsing data. By specifically targeting these sensitive segments with high-arousal emotional content, brands can significantly improve advertising efficiency and conversion rates. Overall, the research highlights the necessity of using emotional intensity as a strategic tool in the modern e-commerce landscape to capture consumer attention and drive meaningful behavioral changes.

 

In international conflicts, a land power may be motivated to wage wars for territorial expansion, but engaging in a prolonged war is costly. Therefore, the decision between war and peace is of critical importance and has been extensively studied in game theory by analyzing the payoffs associated with different actions. In various fully cooperative games, participants have been shown to converge on visually salient choices. However, in pure zero-sum competitions, focal points are of little use because rational decisions are completely determined by the payoff matrix. It remains unclear how focal points function in mixed-motive competitions such as ground wars, where intense competition coexists with opportunities for reciprocal settlement. In existing studies of mixed-motive games, researchers have mainly focused on manipulating information directly related to the rules and rewards of the games. Therefore, it remains unknown whether perceptual grouping, which is irrelevant to the rules and rewards, can influence the progress of conflict.

Addressing this question, the present research demonstrates that perceptual grouping, although completely irrelevant to the payoffs, can nevertheless provide salient visual common ground as a mutually recognized focal point. As a result, it significantly reduces conflicts between powers and facilitates peaceful settlements along the borders of perceptual groups. To test this idea, we designed a two-player game that highlights three fundamental principles of land-power competition. Players' wealth increases with territorial expansion. However, war is expensive even for the winner, and troops consume more supplies as they move farther from the capital. The players' goal is not to annihilate the opponent but to acquire the maximum wealth. We employed a between-group design in which participants were divided into two conditions. In the grouping condition, players competed on a battlefield divided into two perceptual groups marked by colors, whereas in the non-grouping condition the battlefield was homochromatic and contained no perceptual grouping. Importantly, the colors were completely irrelevant to the rules of the game.

In Experiment 1 (a six-grid battlefield) and Experiment 2 (a seven-grid battlefield), human participants in the grouping condition initiated fewer wars, accumulated more wealth, and achieved more peaceful settlements than those in the non-grouping condition. Moreover, the perceptual boundary was respected by the players: they were less likely to cross a line when it was marked by perceptual grouping. We propose that this facilitation of peace arises from perceptual grouping serving as a shared visual common ground among humans. To test this mechanism, in Experiment 3 we presented the two participants with different battlefields: the color of the middle grid was reversed. One player saw three red grids and four blue grids, whereas the other saw four red grids and three blue grids. Under this condition, the effect of perceptual grouping disappeared. When perceptual grouping was mismatched between players, it failed to constrain conflict. In addition, the effect of perceptual grouping appeared to be largely implicit, as almost all participants failed to report any influence of the color groups on their decisions.

Our findings provide strong evidence that perceptual grouping, as a purely visual phenomenon, can facilitate tacit cooperation between participants in repeated mixed-motive game situations. This discovery supports the hypothesis that even in intense competition, humans tend to seek reciprocal settlements by aligning their expectations with salient visual cues that serve as perceptual focal points. The results also offer insights for the design of AI systems: in human-AI interaction, rational decision-making alone is insufficient; AI systems must also learn human psychological and perceptual representations in order to collaborate effectively with humans. More broadly, this study suggests that the balance of power in the world may be implicitly and subtly influenced by humans' perceptual grouping of territory.