Introduction

Media contact refers to the behavioral response of an audience to contact with specific media based on particular needs. The contact can be described in terms of frequency, during, form, content, and method (Tassi, 2018). The Internet has been termed the “fourth media” after newspapers, radio, and television, and rapidly penetrated all fields of modern life with its colorful, intuitive, vivid, emotive, lively, and exciting characteristics (Van Dijck, 2022).

As of June 30, 2022, there are 5.47 billion Internet users in the world’s 7.93 billion population, and the Internet penetration rate was 68.98% (Internet Usage Statistics, 2022). In 2021, there was 191 million Internet users among children and adolescents in China, and the Internet penetration rate was 96.8% (China Youth Network, 2022). Internet contact is a new concept in the Internet era. Internet contact wasn’t clearly defined, typically focusing on the qualitative analysis of form, content, duration, and frequency. Internet contact included three dimensions in this study: Internet contact during (ICD), online entertainment duration, and fragmented learning duration. Reading online news, watching videos, posting, emailing, chatting, finding information and shopping online are all important parts of university student’s lives, and they affect every aspect of their daily lives to meet their social, entertainment, informational and psychological needs (Li et al., 2022a).

There is no clear definition for ideological and mental health education (IMHE) in the Internet era yet. In this study, IMHE refers to the deep integration of information technologies, such as new media, 5G, and big data with traditional IMHE, as well as the integration of explicit and implicit, online and offline IMHE based on content, platforms, ideas, and methods in order to improve communication effect. The communication environment of IMHE has become more complex in the Internet era, involving the integration of culture, technology, society, and the psychological environment (Yao, 2023). Market-oriented reform has meant online media are increasingly driven by commercial interests. The commercial perspective caters to the needs of the public with an entertaining attitude (Szu et al., 2017), resulting in the continuous production of many similar, often vulgar, fast-food entertainment and cultural products. Even Internet news and information dissemination have shown a clear trend of pan entertainment (Li and Wan, 2023). The cultural spirit of entertainment is contradictory to the seriousness of IMHE, which may lead to marginalization, vulgarization, and stigmatization of IMHE (Chen and Jing, 2018). This can significantly affect the value orientation, psychology, personality and interpersonal interaction of university students (Dong et al., 2017).

In concrete terms, Internet contact affects university students’ IMHE communication effect in two opposite ways–with promotion and inhibition of communication effects (Huang et al., 2021). The openness of the Internet provides new opportunities for information access, enriches the carrier and content, enhances the penetration of IMHE of university students, strengthens their subjective consciousness, and speeds up the cognitive transmission and value-added speed (Zhang et al., 2023). Especially the integration of new media and artificial intelligence greatly expands the form and content of IMHE (Yuan, 2022). On the contrary, researchers describing the inhibitory effect believed that the increasing entertainment and decadent value orientation of new media culture, and the emergence of a large amount of inauthentic information on the Internet, including false, pornographic, violent, and reactionary spam, are prone to misleading and inducing cognitive bias and fast-food learning habits among university and college students, and jeopardizing their physical and mental health (Cebrian-Robles, 2019; Xu et al., 2022). Furthermore, the Internet’s accessibility weakens the effect of traditional ideological education for university students, challenging the authority of traditional sources of education, and affecting the value judgment ability of students.

Whether the communication of university students’ IMHE is effective, is mainly reflected in whether students’ cognition is improved, their spiritual needs are met, and their personal development is promoted. Cognition is a psychological activity that reflects the characteristics and internal connections of objective things from the surface to the inside, from phenomena to essence, and is also the processing of information by the human brain (Yang, 2022). Up to now, the communication effect of IMHE is not convenient for quantitative analysis, which seriously affects the systematic study in this field.

Thus, the following hypothesis is proposed:

Hypothesis H1: There are significant differences in the communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students, which will provide theoretical references for future intervention.

Hypothesis H1a: There is a significant difference in the cognitive communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

Hypothesis H1b: There is a significant difference in the emotional communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

Hypothesis H1c: There is a significant difference in the will communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

Hypothesis H1d: There is a significant difference in the behavioral communication effect of ICD on IMHE among Chinese university students.

These findings fill the existing literature gap in Internet contact and communication effect of IMHE among university students, as well as provide theoretical references for quantitatively analyzing and intervention in this field in the Internet era.

Methodology

Study design

A cross-sectional descriptive and non-experimental study was employed that relies on quantitative methods. The study’s main objective was to explore the impact of Internet contact on the IMHE of university students. The researcher sent the questionnaire link (questionnaire website or QR code) created using Wenjuanxing software to groups of WeChat teacher users and asked them to share it with their students for voluntary and free participation. The questionnaire was anonymous, and participants did not receive any payment. The study was conducted in April to May 2022.

Participants

All participants were native Mandarin speakers and recruited through WeChat from Xinyang Normal University in China, a social media application widely used in China. WeChat was selected because the users have been verified. Thus, there is almost no possibility of fake profiles. A total of 2356 university students were recruited to fill in the questionnaire, which included Internet contact, IMHE and demographic information. Invalid participants were removed (e.g., not completing the questionnaire, lacking population information), finally 2294 valid participants aged 17–22 years were collected (response rate: 97.37%).

As shown in Table 1, 1824 (79.51%) were female, and 470 (20.49%) were male. Their majors were liberal arts (748 participants, 32.61%), science (1070, 46.64%), engineering (273, 11.90%) and art (203, 8.85%). Their main information source was from the Internet (95.38%), followed by the classroom (76.94%), and books (69.92%). When they surfed on the Internet, they chatted (89.63%), read Weibo or friend circle (75.94%), watched videos (75.46%), shopped (54.66%), and read news (50.48%). In general, most participants were female, mainly from science and liberal arts. The Internet was the most important information source for university students (95.38%), providing social functions through online chatting (89.63%).

Table 1 Participant characteristics (N = 2294).
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Data collection

In this study, data were collected through an online questionnaire created using Wenjuanxing software. Internet contact included three dimensions: Internet contact duration (ICD), online entertainment duration, and fragmented learning duration (Appendix 1). Each had five possible answers: 0, <2, 2–5, 5–8, or >8 (h/day). The questionnaire on IMHE focused on form, content (Appendix 2), and communication effect (Appendix 3). The evaluation of the communication effect of IMHE focused on cognition, emotion, will, and behavior (Huang et al., 2021). A 5-point Likert scale was used (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = somewhat disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = somewhat agree, 5 = strongly agree). The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) test and Cronbach’s alpha of the questionnaire were 0.754 and 0.774, respectively, indicating the questionnaire’s good reliability and validity. Higher scores indicated a better communication effect of IMHE for university students. In addition, a multiple-choice question with 7 options for the benefits of learning about mental health (Appendix 4).

Data analysis

The data of categorical variable (e.g., gender and major) were expressed in frequencies and proportions. The data of continuous variables (e.g., age, communication effect) is represented as mean ± standard deviation. Significant differences between variables were determined by chi-square test and Mann-Whitney U test using statistical software (SPSS v20, IBM, Armonk, NY, United States). The definition of “ICD-long” is that the Internet contact duration exceeds two hours per day, while “ICD-short” means less than two hours per day.

Results

ICD of university students

The ICD of university students was summarized in Table 2. The during was 2–5 hours (42.07%) and 5–8 hours per day (39.63%). Online entertainment duration was mainly 2–5 hours (48.30%) and approximately one-quarter of the sample (26.29%) spent less than 2 hours on online entertainment each day. Online fragmented learning duration was mainly 2–5 hours per day (45.55%), or less than 2 hours (35.09%). In short, nearly half students spent 2–5 hours online every day, participating in online entertainment and fragment learning.

Table 2 ICD of university students (N = 2294).
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Impact of ICD on the IMHE

Table 3 shows the impact of ICD on the form and content of IMHE. There were significant differences between the ICD-short and ICD-long groups excluding forms of educational films, communication and discussion, and surfing the Internet. Both groups favored three forms: educational films, communication and discussion, and classroom teaching.

Table 3 Impact of ICD on the form and content of IMHE (N = 2294).
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As for the content, there were significant differences between the ICD-short and ICD-long groups in contents of psychological counseling, Marxist classics, and ideological theory learning. The three favorite contents are comments on current events, psychological counseling, and national policies and regulations.

As shown in Table 4, there were significant differences between the ICD-short and ICD-long groups in the cognitive (P = 0.011) and behavior (P = 0.002) communication effect of IMHE, excluding emotional (P = 0.200) and will (P = 0.072) dimensions. The ICD-long group had higher scores for cognition and emotion dimensions than the ICD-short group, but will and behavior dimensions were exactly the opposite. Furthermore, regardless of whether the ICD was long or short, the emotion dimension scored the highest, followed by behavior and will, and finally the cognitive dimension.

Table 4 Impact of ICD on the communication effect of IMHE (N = 2294).
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Thus, the results support H1a and H1d, but don’t support H1b and H1c.

Benefits for students after conducting IMHE

As shown in Fig. 1, after conducting IMHE the ICD-long group had better emotion management, increased anti-frustration ability, and enhanced adaptability than the ICD-short group. Furthermore, the ICD-short group was more optimistic and had stronger willpower than the ICD-long group. In short, university students had stronger emotional management abilities and were more optimistic after conducting IMHE.

Fig. 1: Benefits for university students after conducting IMHE.
figure 1

ICD Internet contact duration, ICD-long Internet contact duration exceeds two hours per day, ICD-short Internet contact less than two hours per day. The vertical axis stands for the six benefits for university students after conducting IMHE. The horizontal axis stands for the proportion of university students with each benefit.

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Discussion

Internet contact is a new concept that has emerged with the rapid development of the Internet in the Internet era. Internet contact plays an important role in the social life of today’s young adults (Smahel et al., 2020). Young people spend a great deal of time engaged in online activities due to the wealth of information and entertainment opportunities provided by the Internet (Kopecky et al., 2021; Obokata and Pauen, 2022). Information can be shared through the Internet in the form of text, video, pictures, audio, and references. Studies show that students and educators use a variety of social media websites–YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google, WeChat, and Wikis – for learning, teaching, clinical skills training, experience sharing, and communication (Durkee et al., 2012; Nicolai et al., 2017). Social networking sites are often useful tools for first-year university students to start building their university networks (Ellison et al., (2007)), and constitute powerful communication and learning tools (Nisar et al., 2022). Spanish teenagers spend five to six hours per day using SMS, chatting, gaming, surfing the Internet, streaming media, and video-sharing (Dimitrova and Papancheva, 2019). The top five leisure activities for Saudi medical students aged 18–24 years were browsing social media (75.9%), watching movies (61.3%), hanging out with friends (58.1%), spending time with family (55.4%), and surfing the Internet (53.6%) (Bin Abdulrahman et al., 2021). YouTube videos can also be used to clarify problems, enhance learning, and facilitate students contact with other sources and teaching methods (Morais and Zacariotti, 2020).

The communication effect is the retention of communicated messages in memory, changing attitudes and leading to changes in personal or social behavior (Dong, 2008). The communication activities of IMHE usually use media to give full play to their functions to influence and change students’ ideological attitudes and health. They focus on students’ evaluative understanding of truth and falsehood and emotional tendencies, such as likes and dislikes based on cognition, which are then manifested as behavioral tendencies (Yang and Zhang, 2021). This study found that regardless of whether the ICD of university students was long or short, the cognitive dimension score was the lowest. Cognition is a psychological process that provides the ability to think, perceive, and learn (Savarimuthu and Ponniah, 2024). Cognition is the precursor of behavior. Feelings and perceptions are cognitive foundations (Zhao, 2022). Thus, the IMHE for university and college students needs to start from their cognitive system to deeply explore how the concept of IMHE can attract attention to complex brain mechanisms, enter the perceptual stage, and enhance the generation of memory and cognitive processing. Based on fully exerting the initiative of college students, guiding them to pay intentional attention to IMHE information, strengthening cognitive concepts, increasing emotional investment, and ultimately achieving the integration of knowledge and action in IMHE.

In addition, the characteristics of the main body of IMHE communication in the Internet era, such as decentralization, three-dimensional and diversified information sources, and content, are becoming more and more prominent. Mobile Internet technology has freed university students from the limitations of time and space, and they can use their fragmented time to obtain information (Liu et al., 2022). At the same time, the information presented by new media’s orientation toward visual culture is increasingly fragmented and entertaining. Excessive fragmented reading may make university students prone to thinking inertia, leading to a lack of overall worldview and comprehensiveness (Salarvand et al., 2022). In addition, Internet information is often inaccurate (He et al., 2021), which may lead to students who rely on fragmented reading but lack in-depth thinking and training to make appropriate value judgments about key information. Furthermore, if Internet contact is not properly controlled, it can also lead university students to Internet addiction (Meppelink et al., 2022). University students with low Internet literacy are immersed in the pluralistic value orientation of the Internet for a long time, they may blindly follow decadent values and social trends, leading to confused or disordered value orientation, thoughts, and behavior (Chen, 2024).

This study found that after IMHE learning, university students were more capable of managing their emotions, and were more optimistic, which was consistent with previous studies (Guo, 2022). Positive guidance from IMHE greatly reduced the negative emotions of university and college students (Li et al., 2022b). This inspires us to fully consider the IMHE communication effect and Internet contact of university students to construct differentiated interventions in the future.

Limitations

First, the participants selected were limited to university students from a university in central China. Second, there may be a bias in the ICD because of self-report questionnaires. Finally, this study only compared the benefits about learning mental, but did not conduct in-depth research on university students’ mental health, such as depression, anxiety, and other psychological problems they may experience. Nonetheless, 2,294 university students aged 18–22 from different majors participated in the questionnaire, and the heterogeneity still provides valuable insights for future study in this field. In the future, diversified methods should be explored to measure the ICD and communication effect of IMHE among college students to achieve objective evaluation.

Conclusion

This study found that nearly half of the university students spent 2–5 hours online every day for entertainment or fragmented learning. Educational films, communication and discussion, and classroom teaching were the most popular forms of IMHE, while comments on current events, psychological counseling, and national policies and regulations were the most favorite contents of IMHE. Internet contact had significant impacts on the cognitive and behavioral communication of IMHE among Chinese university students. The emotional dimension had the best communication effect, followed by behavior and will, and finally the cognitive dimension. After conducting IMHE, university students had stronger emotional management abilities and were more optimistic. Future research should focus on differentiated interventions according to different ICD and communication effect of IMHE, as well as the impact of Internet contact on specific mental health issues (e.g., depression, anxiety, Internet addiction) among college students.