English proficiency and global competence among undergraduates in Sino-Foreign Cooperation Programmes: the mediating role of intercultural sensitivity and moderating role of English learning motivatio

Psychological crisis vulnerability refers to the extent to which individuals lack the capacity to withstand crises arising from sudden events or major setbacks (). Among Chinese university students, mental-health problems have shown persistent or increasing trends over the past decade (; ), and existing research has documented several risk pathways: ostracism predicts elevated crisis vulnerability through self-uncertainty and subjective social status (); social exclusion increases suicide intention through depression (); and depression and ostracism associate reciprocally via interpretation bias (). Far less empirical attention has been paid to institutional protective resources that might mitigate vulnerability. In Chinese higher education, the counselor (Fu dao yuan) is a full-time staff member assigned to each class at approximately 1:200. The role combines functions distributed across academic advising, residence-life coordination, and frontline mental-health gatekeeping in Western universities, with weekly to biweekly student contact and substantive engagement in value-oriented dialogue. Recent implementation work such as the ACE-LYNX intervention for Chinese university health-service providers () shows that structured training of frontline staff can improve service quality, but the underlying pathways through which value-oriented counselor guidance protects student mental health remain underspecified. Against this background, three gaps motivate the present research. First, protective institutional resources—and the Chinese counselor role in particular—remain far less specified empirically than risk factors, even though the counselor system is structurally positioned to influence student wellbeing. Second, the mechanisms through which counselor guidance might relate to lower vulnerability are largely untested: prior implementation work demonstrates that training frontline staff can improve service quality () but does not identify the intermediate psychological processes involved. Third, no prior study has examined whether meaning-based and resilience-based routes contribute comparably or asymmetrically to this protective association—the equal-magnitude question (H2c) that is one of the principal contributions of this work. The present two-study design targets all three gaps: Study 1 specifies and tests the dual-pathway architecture correlationally, and Study 2 provides an exploratory intervention test of whether the same two pathways can be engaged.