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Article History

Received: 18 January 2024

Accepted: 26 June 2025

First Online: 10 July 2025

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of the School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, on June 23, 2022. The approval covered the design, data collection, and analysis procedures of the study involving human participants. All research procedures were conducted in accordance with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.

: Informed consent was obtained in writing from all participants before data collection. Participants were informed of the research purpose, their right to withdraw without penalty, and how their data would be used. Consent was obtained in September 2022 by the researcher Yuhan Tian from 40 adult WeChat users (20 younger adults aged 25–30 and 20 older adults aged 60–72). Participants were assured that their chat data would remain anonymous and confidential. They were informed that the data would be used solely for academic purposes and that no identifiable information would be disclosed or published. All participants explicitly consented to the use of anonymized quotes in publication.