ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1673559
This article is part of the Research TopicCulture and Emotion in Educational Dynamics - Volume IVView all 16 articles
Crying in the algorithm: Modeling Academic Stress via Multilayer Topic Construction and ERA Effect
Provisionally accepted
- Macao Polytechnic University, Macau, Macao, SAR China
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Amid intensifying educational competition and societal expectations, academic stress has emerged as a multidimensional force influencing student mental health. While prior research has explored individual and institutional factors, limited attention has been paid to how learners semantically construct and express academic stress in digital environments. Addressing this gap, this study introduces an innovative multilayered topic modeling framework that integrates BERTopic and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), enabling a semantic, data-driven analysis of 33,827 user-generated comments related to academic pressure on social media. Grounded in Multilevel Stress Theory, the analysis identifies six interrelated topics reflecting the interplay of individual, situational, and structural stressors. Drawing on these findings, the study develops the Expectancy–Regulation– Amplification (ERA) Model, which conceptualizes academic stress as a dynamic process shaped by the tension between external expectations and perceived capabilities, limitations in self-regulatory resources, and the cumulative amplification of stress across sociocultural and digital environments. By mapping how academic pressure is linguistically reproduced and sentimentally intensified in algorithmic settings, the ERA model provides an interpretive framework for understanding the semantics of student vulnerability and contributes new insights to targeted interventions in educational and mental health contexts.
Keywords: Academic pressure, Multi level topic modeling, Multilevel Stress Theory, sentimentanalysis, Expectancy-Regulation-Amplification (ERA)
Received: 26 Jul 2025; Accepted: 05 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 DING, Zhang and Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hongfeng Zhang, Macao Polytechnic University, Macau, Macao, SAR China
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