Dr. Wei Yao obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Department of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and joined the School of Marxism at Southern University of Science and Technology as an Assistant Professor in September 2026.

Postdoc, Shuimu Scholar 2023.12-2026.07 Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School

Ph.D. 2018.08-2023.10 The Chinese University of Hong Kong Sociology

M.A. 2015.08-2018.06 Sun Yat-Sen University Sociology

B.A. 2011.09-2015.06 Sun Yat-Sen University Sociology

Research Area: Digital Ideological and Political Education, Digital Social Governance, Digital Well-Being, Youth and Adolescent Studies

Publications:

First Author

The co-occurrence of adolescent smartphone addiction and academic burnout: The role of smartphone stress and digital flourishing, Education and Information Technologies, 2025, 30(0): 4987-5007. (SSCI, Q1)

The intersection of gender and migrant status: Psychoactive drug use among young Chinese female migrants. Deviant Behavior, 2025: 1-19. (SSCI, Q2)

Examining the victim–perpetrator overlap in adolescent cyber dating abuse from the perspectives of cyberlifestyle-routine activities, social learning, and social bonding, Violence and Victims, 2026. (SSCI, Forthcoming)

Directional Relations between Symptoms of Adolescent Smartphone Addiction, Academic Burnout, and Psychological Distress: A Cross-Lagged Panel Network Analysis, Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 2026, 19:579858. (SSCI, Q1)

From lockdown to liberation: A cross-time network comparison of social media use and psychological well-being among young adults. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2026, 29(6), 372-380. (Joint First Author, SSCI, Q1) 

Other Co-Authored Work

Cheung, Nicole W. T.*; Yao, Wei. Assessing the victim-perpetrator overlap in adolescent dating violence in China: A latent class analysis, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2025, 40(23-24):5496-5527. (SSCI, Q1)

Cheung, Nicole W. T.*; Yao, Wei. The integration paradox: discrimination, institutional trust, and settlement intention among highly educated mainland Chinese migrants in Hong Kong and Macao, Asian Population Studies, 2022, 18(2): 150-168. (SSCI, Q2)

Ni, Shiguang; Xue, Yaxian; Yao, Wei; Hou, Hanchao*; Wang, Pusheng. Mapping the structure of wellbeing from a systems perspective: A network analysis of 15 constituents in Chinese adolescents, Current Psychology, 2025, 44: 17912–17922. (SSCI, Q1)

Ni, Shiguang; Ye, Ying; Yao, Wei; Xue, Yaxian; Hou, Hanchao*. The longitudinal relationship between digital flourishing and mental health in adolescents: The mediating role of psychological resilience. Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2025, 33 (03): 583-588. (in Chinese, CSSCI)

Ma, Fei; Xie, Yifan; Li, Yukan; He, Ying; Zhang, Yi; Ren, Hongwei; Liu, Zhou; Yao, Wei; Ren, Fuji; Yu, Fei; Ni, Shiguang*. A review of human emotion synthesis based on generative technology. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2025, 16(4), 2579-2598. (SCIE, Q1)

Qiu, Wenyu; Wang, Yuxiong; Tan, Jiajun; Hou, Hanchao; Liu, Qinda; Yao, Wei; Ni, Shiguang*. DeepWell-Adol: A Scalable Expert-Based Dialogue Corpus for Adolescent Positive Mental Health and Wellbeing Promotion. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2025: 12786–12810.