tVNS and obesity-related inflammation: a prospective sham-controlled randomized crossover study protocol.

Subjective well-being (SWB) has become a central concern in educational psychology, as it is closely associated with students’ psychological adjustment and developmental outcomes (). Recent studies further show that well-being and anxiety are shaped by contextual conditions across levels, including macroeconomic stability, urbanization, and classroom learning structures (; ). Vocational college students have attracted increasing attention due to their heightened vulnerability to mental health challenges compared with students in traditional academic universities (). In China, vocational education has expanded rapidly, now enrolling over 30 million students nationwide (). Within this context, vocational education is often perceived as a less prestigious pathway, which may further shape students’ self-evaluations and motivational experiences. Accumulating evidence indicates that vocational college students experience considerable psychological strain, with prevalence rates of mental health symptoms frequently exceeding 30% (; ). Understanding the psychological factors associated with their subjective well-being is therefore of both theoretical and practical importance. Vocational college students in physical education settings represent a context in which basic psychological needs, emotion regulation demands, and performance-related pressures are simultaneously salient and ecologically intertwined. Three features make this population particularly informative for the present study. First, vocational students face multiple stressors that can activate psychological need frustration, including career transition pressure, the perceived lower prestige of vocational education, and employment uncertainty. Second, physical education courses involve recurring performance evaluation, skill-based assessment, and peer comparison—features that directly engage perceptions of competence and autonomy. Third, the co-occurrence of these educational and sport-related pressures means that both need frustration and emotion regulation demands are likely to be salient in students’ daily course participation. Unlike general college samples, where such pressures may be diffuse or intermittent, vocational physical education students encounter a concentrated intersection of need-relevant stressors and regulatory challenges, providing a theoretically informative and ecologically meaningful setting for examining the proposed conditional associations. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) provides a useful framework for examining variations in well-being across educational contexts (). According to SDT, the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs-autonomy, competence, and relatedness-is essential for optimal functioning, whereas psychological need frustration reflects experiences that actively thwart these needs and has been statistically associated with maladaptive emotional and motivational outcomes (; ). Research has consistently shown that need frustration is statistically associated with diminished well-being in student populations (). Vocational education settings, which often involve frequent evaluation, skill-based assessment, and social comparison, may amplify perceptions of competence threat and external pressure, potentially intensifying experiences of psychological need frustration.