ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2026
Academic burnout in higher education: a multimodal study of resting-state EEG microstate correlates beyond trait anxiety, depressive symptoms, and self-efficacy in Chinese undergraduates.
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Background: Academic burnout is a mental-health-relevant outcome of higher-education stress, but its relationship with spontaneous brain dynamics remains unclear. EEG microstates are quasi-stable scalp-potential configurations indexing millisecond-level transitions between large-scale resting brain states. This study tested whether resting-state EEG microstate dynamics are associated with academic burnout beyond trait anxiety, depressive symptoms, and general self-efficacy as perceived coping capacity. Methods: Participants were 330 Chinese undergraduates (94 men, 236 women; mean age = 18.31 years, SD = 0.84). They completed self-report measures and an eyes-closed resting-state EEG recording. Academic burnout total score was the primary outcome. Covariate-adjusted partial correlations examined burnout-microstate associations. Hierarchical regression tested the incremental value of selected microstate markers. Results: Higher academic burnout was associated with higher trait anxiety (r = 0.539, p < 0.001), higher depressive symptoms (r = 0.526, p < 0.001), and lower general self-efficacy (r = -0.474, p < 0.001). After adjustment for age, sex, trait anxiety, depressive symptoms, and general self-efficacy, greater burnout was associated with shorter microstate D duration (partial r = -0.196, q = 0.0049), higher microstate C occurrence (partial r = 0.172, q = 0.0081), shorter mean microstate duration, and higher mean occurrence. The psychological block explained substantial variance in burnout (R² = 0.417); adding microstate D duration and microstate C occurrence produced a small but significant improvement in model fit (ΔR² = 0.025, p = 0.001). In a scale-midpoint sensitivity analysis, the higher-burnout group showed shorter class D duration after covariate adjustment (adjusted B = -3.38 ms, 95% CI [-6.12, -0.64], p = 0.016). Dimension-specific analyses indicated that microstate associations were mainly evident for dejection and low sense of accomplishment, not the behavioral (improper-behavior) component. Conclusion: Academic burnout in undergraduates was primarily linked to internalizing distress and lower perceived coping capacity. Resting-state EEG microstate dynamics, especially shorter class D duration, provided modest incremental information, suggesting reduced temporal persistence of a canonical resting-state configuration among students with higher burnout. These findings do not establish a diagnostic EEG marker or a burnout-specific neural mechanism, but support multimodal, context-sensitive research on academic stress and mental health in higher education.
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