Learning burnout is a stress response that students are unable to cope with academic stress, and is an emotional, attitude, and behavioral failure that occurs when students are unable to meet their learning needs (Tuominen-Soini and Salmela-Aro, 2014). Learning burnout has a significant impact on learning and life, leading to a range of adverse developmental outcomes, such as low academic performance, truancy, absenteeism, and dropping out of school (Bask and Salmela Aro, 2013). Family socioeconomic status (FSES) is an important factor in learning burnout, and students with high FSES are more enthusiastic and mentally full in the learning process (Randolph et al., 2006). Consequently, students with high FSES tend to have less burnout (Luo et al., 2016; Yun et al., 2016). Along with the Family Investment Model, households with higher socioeconomic status have significant advantages in terms of income, social capital, and human capital, which can be translated into resources for student development, thereby affecting students’ level of development (Conger and Donnellan, 2007), which in turn leads to a more positive attitude toward learning tasks, resulting in lower learning burnout (Randolph et al., 2006). Previous studies have focused on the relationship between low FSES and adolescent problem behavior, while there have been relatively few studies on the internal mechanism and protective factors of FSES affecting college students’ learning burnout, so it is not possible to mitigate the negative effects of disadvantage on college students’ learning burnout from the front end and prevent behavioral problems. The university period is an important for individuals to acquire knowledge, develop and form self-identity. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the mechanism and influence conditions of FSES on learning burnout in the group of college students to promote their development.

The Family Stress Model shows that parents with high FSES have less mental and financial stress, more harmonious family relationships, and are more able to raise their children positively, giving them higher subjective well-being and life satisfaction so that there are more positive emotions toward study and life, which has an important impact on reducing students’ learning burnout (Conger et al., 2010; Buzzai et al., 2020). Subjective well-being is defined as the individual’s overall perception and judgment of his or her quality of life based on his or her subjective criteria, characterized by subjectivity, stability, and integrity (Diener et al., 1999), which plays an important role in the formation and development of individual career expectations (Chen and Zhou, 2003). Subjective well-being is a multi-layered and multi-dimensional construct consisting mainly of life satisfaction and emotional experiences (positive and negative emotions) (Wu, 2000). Life satisfaction is an overall cognitive judgment of the quality of life, and the balance of positive and negative emotions reflects the individual’s emotional experience of life (Diener and Ryan, 2009). Studies have shown a significant positive correlation between FSES in adolescent families and subjective well-being and adolescent life satisfaction (Ni et al., 2016; Huang et al., 2019). Low FSES is a high-risk factor for poor emotional adaptation among mobile adolescents (Wang and Mesman, 2015; Li et al., 2016a,b; Yanbin et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2017), and is closely related to different emotional symptoms in adolescents (Bradley and Corwyn, 2002; Chen et al., 2016). Moreover, there was a significant negative correlation between the subjective well-being of college students and the dimensions of dejection, improper behavior strength, and reduced personal accomplishment of learning burnout (Li et al., 2012). Subjective well-being is an individual’s inclusive evaluation of their quality of life, so individuals with high subjective well-being have more positive inner experiences, enough social support and psychological energy to actively cope with academic pressure, thereby relieving depression and maintaining a high level sense of achievement (An and Zhang, 2016). Therefore, the predictive effect of FSES on the level of college students’ learning burnout may be realized by influencing subjective well-being, explicitly, subjective well-being has a mediating role in the influence of FSES on college students’ learning burnout, but there is still no research to confirm this view.

The Resilience Framework Theory believes that the individual’s protective factors can reduce the negative impact of the risk factors in the external situation on the individual’s development through some means such as selective perception, reconstruction, changing the environment, and active coping (Kumpfer, 1999). Resilience refers to the psychological process by which an individual can still gain positive adaptation when he or she is exposed to a major threat or trauma (Cakir et al., 2021). It is considered a good personal quality that can still perform well after a setback and plays an important role in dealing with external stress situations. Resilience has a direct predictive effect on the individual’s ability to learn independently and is the main factor affecting the adaptation of an individual learning career. Improving resilience can reduce the production of learning burnout (Rios-Risquez et al., 2016; An et al., 2019). Thus a high level of mental resilience can alleviate the risk of learning burnout caused by low FSES (Schelvis et al., 2014; Bird and Pincavage, 2016; McKenna et al., 2016); and the risk of the internal psychological elasticity factors of an individual including emotions (emotional expression and subjective well-being, etc.), cognition (learning and imagination, etc.) and behavior (execution ability, operation ability, etc.) through the process of psychological resilience, so that the individual finally obtains the result of adaptation (Kumpfer, 1999), which means learning burnout may be affected by the interaction of resilience with FSES and subjective well-being. Previous studies have examined the psychological resilience process of cognitive and behavioral factors that affected learning burnout (Wu et al., 2016; Fan et al., 2021), while less exploring the interaction of emotional factors such as subjective well-being and resilience on college students’ learning burnout.

To sum up, some studies have shown that FSES is an important factor affecting college students’ learning burnout, but the relationship between FSES and college students’ learning burnout and “how and when” FSES affects learning burnout still need to be further explored (see Figure 1). The individual-environmental interaction theory also points out that the individual’s behavioral problems are the result of the interaction of negative environmental factors and individual trait factors (Lerner et al., 2006). Therefore, to further clarify the formation and development mechanism of college students’ learning burnout, it is necessary to examine the mediating and moderating mechanism of environmental factors (FSES), emotional factors (subjective well-being), and cognitive factors (resilience) in college students’ learning burnout from the perspective of multi-factor integration. Based on the above discussion, this study puts forward the following hypotheses:

Based on previous research and the family stress model and psychological resilience framework theory, the present study constructs a moderated mediation model based on subjective well-being as a mediating variable and resilience as a moderating variable, which not only clarifies the problem of FSES “how to affect” college students’ learning burnout (the mediating role of subjective well-being) but also responses what conditions for FSES did the more significant effects of learning burnout (the moderating effect of resilience). The results of the study have some theoretical and practical significance for deepening the relationship between FSES and individual psychological and behavioral adaptation, guiding college students with poor family conditions to cultivate subjective well-being and alleviating learning burnout.

Consistent with previous studies, the results of the study show that the FSES is significantly negative in predicting college students’ learning burnout (Luo et al., 2016; Yun et al., 2016). Families with lower socioeconomic status provide less available capital for their children’s development, and their children lack opportunities to enjoy high-quality educational resources. The pressure from the family’s social economy also prevents their children from devoting themselves to learning, which may affect their learning adaptation (Wei, 2015), and may even lead to desertion, runaway, and other rebellious behavior. As a result, lower socioeconomic status affects family function and individual adaptation, and children from low-economic families are more likely to experience learning burnout (Masarik and Conger, 2017). What is more, learning burnout affects college students’ academic achievement and learning efficiency, and even leads to individuals experiencing stress events such as failing courses, repeating grades, or dropping out of school, so that individuals experience strong frustration, depression, indifference, anxiety, depression, low sense of self-worth, and other negative psychological state, seriously affecting their mental health, subjective well-being, and life satisfaction (Li and Tan, 2007; Shan et al., 2010; Qian et al., 2015).

The study found that FSES affected college students’ learning burnout by partially mediating role of subjective well-being, and generally supported the family stress model that high FSES college students were more able to be satisfied in material and life, experience higher subjective well-being, and therefore more active in learning, self-efficacy and achievement (Neubauer et al., 2018; Buzzai et al., 2020), which supports H1. Subjective well-being reflects the individual’s life satisfaction and emotional level, and people with high subjective well-being think that life is full of hope and their emotions are more positive (Conger et al., 2010). Therefore, although low FSES has a negative effect on college students’ burnout, they can reduce the level of burnout by improving their subjective well-being.

Based on the psychological resilience framework theory, the present research investigates the moderating role of resilience in the relationship between FSES, subjective well-being, and college students’ learning burnout. The results found that resilience can not only moderate the relationship between FSES and learning burnout but also moderate the mediating model of “FSES—subjective well-being—learning burnout,” which supports H2. Specifically, compared with individuals with high resilience, the direct predictive effect of FSES on learning burnout is more significant for individuals with low resilience. This result not only shows that there are individual differences in the process of resilience causing learning burnout (the mediating role of subjective well-being) but also shows that resilience is a protective factor against other factors to cause individuals to emerge with social maladjustment, which is consistent with the results of previous studies (Stoiber and Good, 1998; Xiaoyi et al., 2004). According to the psychological resilience framework theory, resilience can help individuals change their dangerous environmental factors or make selective awareness of the environment, intentionally or unintentionally, and use this interaction process between the individual and the environment to help high-risk teenagers to control the high-risk environment. Transform into a relatively protective environment, which includes selective perception, cognitive reframing, planning and dreaming, identification and interaction with pro-social people, and positive changes to the environment and proactive response, etc. (Kumpfer, 1999). Individuals with low resilience lack the above-mentioned abilities, and thus it is difficult to get rid of the negative influence of risk environment factors on learning burnout during the growth process. Their learning burnout level increases with the decrease of FSES, while resilience buffers the risk situation. For the impact of problem behaviors, the level of learning burnout remains relatively stable and low.

In addition, the study found that subjective well-being had a positive effect on the learning burnout of high resilience college students compared to low resilience individuals. The results show that resilience, as a cognitive factor, can regulate the influence of emotional factors (subjective well-being) on individual problem behavior, that is, the negative predictive effect of subjective well-being on learning burnout requires a higher resilience of individuals. The psychological resilience framework theory suggests that subjective well-being and resilience, as the process of interaction between internal psychological elasticity factors and negative environmental factors in the body, form a process of psychological resilience and determine the behavioral outcome of individuals (Kumpfer, 1999). College students with low FSES will experience more learning burnout problems, which means that under the negative effect of FSES and the positive influence of protective factors of resilience at the same time, subjective well-being from the internal emotional factors of college students through the internal intermediary process to enable individuals to obtain the final development results, and this result is a bad adaptive result. The lower resilience of individuals can not completely alleviate the negative effects of low FSES, nor can they give full play to the positive effects of emotional factors on learning burnout, which ultimately leads to lower subjective well-being and higher learning burnout (Seligman et al., 2009).

The present study had important theoretical and practical implications for developing interventions for learning burnout. On the theoretical aspect, this result enriches the complex mechanism of interaction between emotional and cognitive factors and individual development results in the existing psychological resilience framework theory, and on the other hand, it provides a theoretical basis and a new perspective for the intervention of positive emotions to promote individual learning adaptation in the practice of real mental health education. The main findings of this study are important for the development of interventions for learning burnout. FSES can indirectly play a role in college students’ learning burnout through the mediating path of subjective well-being, while resilience can regulate the predictive effect of FSES and subjective well-being on learning burnout. This also suggests that learning burnout intervention for college students from different family backgrounds needs to pay attention to the combination of individual cognitive factors and emotional factors for educators and parents through the cultivation of good resilience to increase the positive effect of subjective well-being on learning burnout.

The following limitations exist in this study. First of all, this study uses the cross-sectional study design, which cannot make a causal inference. This moderated mediation model proposed by the present study can be further tested by longitudinal research in the future. Secondly, this study measures resilience through The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, preferring to regard resilience as a trait and neglecting to pay attention to the process of mental resilience. Future research can manipulate different ways of psychological resilience by the experimental method, thus inducing different forms of psychological resilience process of individuals, to examine the moderating effect of resilience on the relationship between FSES, subjective well-being, and learning burnout. Thirdly, the variables in this study are self-reporting. Future studies can measure the main variables of this study using a variety of methods (e.g., self-reporting, parental reporting, and teacher evaluation). In addition, the sample in this study is university students from Kunming, which may affect the popularity of the results. Future researchers can select college students from different regions, majors, and ages to conduct surveys to further test the main results of this study.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/Supplementary Material.

The questionnaire and methodology for this study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Kunming Medical University (Ethics approval number: 2021kmykdx6f65). Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s), and minor(s)’ legal guardian/next of kin, for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.

WW, YZ, and XL: research idea and study design. ZCG, XC, XW, XZ, and FT: data collection. WW, YL, XM, and LY: data analysis and manuscript writing. ZYG, SL, YC, and QL: supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.