Social media applications such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have attained huge popularity, with more than three billion people and organizations predicted to have a social networking account by 2015. Social media offers a rapid avenue of communication with the public and has potential benefits for communicable disease control and surveillance. However, its application in everyday public health practice raises a number of important issues around confidentiality and autonomy. We report here a case from local level health protection where the (...) friend of an individual with meningococcal septicaemia used a social networking site to notify potential contacts. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of Digital Content Marketing on a Mixed Reality training platform environment with the consideration of online purchase intention through social media. E-commerce today encounters several common issues that cause customers to have reservations to purchase online. With the absence of physical contact points, customers often perceive more risks when making purchase decisions. Furthermore, online retailers often find it hard to engage customers and develop long-term relationships. In this research, a Structural (...) Equation Model is proposed to examine the efficacy of DCM from both immediate and long-term OPI. The results examine whether adopting DCM on an MR training platform environment through social media brings positive results in OPI. Empirical research was carried out through online questionnaires collected in 2021 and 2022. A total of 374 questionnaires were qualified for data analysis in this study, conducted with IBM SPSS and AMOS. The results imply that DCM is critical to stimulating both immediate and long-term OPI. The immediate OPI is positively affected by increasing perceived value through MR in DCM. Regarding the long-term OPI, increased customer engagement with DCM under MR environment can cultivate brand trust and significantly affect the long-term OPI. (shrink)

Dans cet article constitué d’extraits de Writing Diaspora (1993), la théoricienne post-coloniale Rey Chow propose une critique en règle des intérêts poursuivis par la recherche académique quand elle investit les figures des subalternes et spécifiquement des « natif·ves » du monde non-occidental. Dans la lignée des travaux de Saïd sur l’orientalisme, Rey Chow dresse le portrait ironique de l’universitaire « maoïste », qui cherche le salut dans l’Orient (ou l’indigène) exotisé. À l’inverse, elle appelle à reconnaître la puissance (...) du silence de la native, un refus de parler qui peut faire bégayer l’ordre du discours, pourvu qu’on y prête l’oreille. (shrink)

Background Care homes have been disproportionately affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Practical challenges of enacting infection control measures in care home settings have been widely reported, but little is known about the ethical concerns of care home staff during the implementation of such measures.. Objectives To understand the ethical challenges perceived by care home staff during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design An exploratory qualitative study. Participants and research context A purposive sample of 15 care home staff (...) in different roles and ranks in Hong Kong was recruited to take part in semi-structured interviews between June and August 2020. Ethical considerations Ethical approval for this study was obtained. Participation was voluntary and anonymous. Participants had the right to withdraw from the study at any time without reprisal. Findings Three themes were identified: unclear legitimacy regarding infection control measures, limited autonomy in choices over infection control measures and inevitable harms to residents’ well-being. While the participants expected that they would have legitimated power to implement infection control measures, they were resistant when their right to self-determination of testing and vaccination was infringed. They also felt trapped between ethical duties to protect care home residents from infection risk and the anticipated detrimental effects of infection control measures. Conclusions The findings of this study reveal tensions among the ethical obligations of care home staff in response to a public health emergency. They highlight the importance of strengthening ethical sensitivity and ethical leadership in identifying and resolving the challenges of pandemic responses. (shrink)

The counseling process involves attention, emotional perception, cognitive appraisal, and decision-making. This study aimed to investigate cognitive appraisal and the associated emotional processes when reading short therapists' statements of motivational interviewing (MI). Thirty participants with work injuries were classified into the pre-contemplation (PC,n= 15) or readiness stage of the change group (RD,n= 15). The participants viewed MI congruent (MI-C), MI incongruent (MI-INC), or control phrases during which their electroencephalograms were captured. The results indicated significant Group × Condition effects in the (...) frontally oriented late positive complex (P600/LPC). The P600/LPC's amplitudes were more positive-going in the PC than in the RD group for the MI congruent statements. Within the PC group, the amplitudes of the N400 were significantly correlated (r= 0.607–0.649) with the participants' level of negative affect. Our findings suggest that the brief contents of MI statements alone can elicit late cognitive and emotional appraisal processes beyond semantic processing. (shrink)

This article examines Chen Ziying, an American-trained Chinese biologist and his prewar efforts to bring his Woods Hole experience from the United States to China between 1930 and 1936. I argue that the Marine Biological Laboratory appears as a prominent American scientific institution in the twentieth century among visiting Chinese students and scholars who were drawn to the American approach of building world-class seaside laboratories to facilitate marine biological study while cultivating a collaborative culture via songs of biology. Chen was (...) one of the leading US-trained Chinese scientists who aspired to the international trend of developing coastal biology in the early twentieth century and was determined to modernize China’s discipline-building of biology with the construction of marine research facilities similar to the MBL. I show that Chen’s efforts of bringing the MBL practice to China took place at a time when science in China was overshadowed by the impulse of nationalism. Despite the nationalistic rhetoric, Chen was able to establish a Chinese connection with Woods Hole by introducing the MBL cultural practices of songs with biological significance. Lyrics from popular biological songs such as “It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus” and “Songs of Amoy” reflect not just Darwinian themes but also a transnational connection between American and Chinese biologists in Republican-era China––a period in modern Chinese history that is often characterized by soaring sentiments of nationalism. This paper sets out to reconsider the interplay of scientific nationalism and scientific internationalism in shaping marine science in modern China, as well as to reflect on the meanings of value-laden terms such as “nationalism” and “foreignness” and their conceptual impacts on writing the historiography of biology in twentieth-century China. (shrink)

Background Moral sensitivity and academic integrity discernment hold paramount importance for healthcare professionals. Owing to distinct undergraduate educational backgrounds, nurses and physicians may exhibit divergent moral perspectives, academic integrity cognisance, and moral sensitivity within clinical environments. A limited number of studies have investigated the disparities and congruencies pertaining to moral sensitivity and academic ethical awareness among nursing and medical students. Objective The study compares moral sensitivity and academic ethical awareness of undergraduate nursing and medical students with and without clinical exposure. (...) Research design A self-administered cross-sectional survey conducted from January to February 2022 was used to collect data from a medical school in Hong Kong. Participants and research context A total of 545 respondents, including 137 nursing students and 408 medical students, completed the questionnaire. Ethical consideration Ethics approval of the study was obtained. Written consent was waived to maintain anonymity because completing the questionnaire was considered implied consent. Findings Both groups of undergraduates demonstrated a high level of bioethics knowledge. In terms of academic integrity, medical students were found to have a less concerned attitude towards punctuality, attendance, and skipping classes. Regarding moral sensitivity, senior medical students with clinical experience put less emphasis on decision-making involving patient participation, while senior nursing students were more hesitant in withholding treatment for incompetent patients who refused treatment. Both nursing and medical students showed decreased moral sensitivity in the ‘conflicts’ domain with increased clinical exposure. Conclusion Study findings contribute to the discussion comparing the ethical attitudes of nursing and medical students. More effort should be made in nursing and medical education to promote practices in line with high academic integrity and to develop the ability to be morally sensitive in professional settings. (shrink)

Extensive research has demonstrated that rs1360780, a common single nucleotide polymorphism within the FKBP5 gene, interacts with early-life stress in predicting psychopathology. Previous results suggest that carriers of the TT genotype of rs1360780 who were exposed to child abuse show differences in structure and functional activation of emotion-processing brain areas belonging to the salience network. Extending these findings on intermediate phenotypes of psychopathology, we examined if the interaction between rs1360780 and child abuse predicts resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between the amygdala (...) and other areas of the salience network. We analyzed data of young European adults from the general population (N = 774; mean age = 18.76 years) who took part in the IMAGEN study. In the absence of main effects of genotype and abuse, a significant interaction effect was observed for rsFC between the right centromedial amygdala and right posterior insula (p <.025, FWE-corrected), which was driven by stronger rsFC in TT allele carriers with a history of abuse. Our results suggest that the TT genotype of rs1360780 may render individuals with a history of abuse more vulnerable to functional changes in communication between brain areas processing emotions and bodily sensations, which could underlie or increase the risk for psychopathology. (shrink)

This paper investigates the drivers and inhibitors of Internet privacy concern. Applying the Multidimensional Development Theory to the online environment, we identify the important factors under four dimensions—i.e., environmental, individual, information management, and interaction management. We tested our model using data from an online survey of 2417 individuals in Hong Kong. The results show that the factors under all four dimensions are significant in the formation of Internet privacy concern. Specifically, familiarity with government legislation, Internet knowledge, benefit of information disclosure, (...) privacy protection, and social presence reduce Internet privacy concern, while individuals’ previous privacy invasion experience, risk avoidance personality, and sensitivity of information requested by websites increase Internet privacy concern. We conducted an analysis of unobserved heterogeneity to confirm the significance of these factors. A follow-up moderation analysis shows that the individual factors moderate the effects of the information management factor and the interaction management factors. The findings provide an integrated understanding of the formation of Internet privacy concern. (shrink)

Cultural competence, a clinical skill to recognise patients' cultural and religious beliefs, is an integral element in patient‐centred medical practice. In the area of death and dying, physicians' understanding of patients' and families' values is essential for the delivery of culturally appropriate care. Dementia is a neurodegenerative condition marked by the decline of cognitive functions. When the condition progresses and deteriorates, patients with advanced dementia often have eating and swallowing problems and are at high risk of developing malnutrition. Enteral tube (...) feeding is a conventional means of providing artificial nutrition and hydration to meet nutritional needs, but its benefits to the frail population are limitedly shown in the clinical evidence. Forgoing tube feeding is ethically challenging when patients are mentally incompetent and in the absence of an advance directive. Unlike some developed countries, like the United States of America, death and dying is a sensitive issue or even a taboo in some cultures in developing countries that forgoing enteral tube feeding is clinically and ethically challenging, such as China and Malaysia. This article in three parts 1) discusses the clinical and ethical issues related to forgoing tube feeding among patients with advanced dementia, 2) describes how Hong Kong Chinese, North American, and Malaysian Islamic cultures respond differently in the decision‐making patterns of forgoing tube feeding for patients with advanced dementia, and 3) reiterates the clinical implications of cultural competence in end‐of‐life care. (shrink)

The null-hypothesis significance-test procedure (NHSTP) is defended in the context of the theory-corroboration experiment, as well as the following contrasts: (a) substantive hypotheses versus statistical hypotheses, (b) theory corroboration versus statistical hypothesis testing, (c) theoretical inference versus statistical decision, (d) experiments versus nonexperimental studies, and (e) theory corroboration versus treatment assessment. The null hypothesis can be true because it is the hypothesis that errors are randomly distributed in data. Moreover, the null hypothesis is never used as a categorical proposition. Statistical (...) significance means only that chance influences can be excluded as an explanation of data; it does not identify the nonchance factor responsible. The experimental conclusion is drawn with the inductive principle underlying the experimental design. A chain of deductive arguments gives rise to the theoretical conclusion via the experimental conclusion. The anomalous relationship between statistical significance and the effect size often used to criticize NHSTP is more apparent than real. The absolute size of the effect is not an index of evidential support for the substantive hypothesis. Nor is the effect size, by itself, informative as to the practical importance of the research result. Being a conditional probability, statistical power cannot be the apriori probability of statistical significance. The validity of statistical power is debatable because statistical significance is determined with a single sampling distribution of the test statistic based on H0, whereas it takes two distributions to represent statistical power or effect size. Sample size should not be determined in the mechanical manner envisaged in power analysis. It is inappropriate to criticize NHSTP for nonstatistical reasons. At the same time, neither effect size, nor confidence interval estimate, nor posterior probability can be used to exclude chance as an explanation of data. Neither can any of them fulfill the nonstatistical functions expected of them by critics. (shrink)

Some important meta-theoretical insights about experimental psychology are integrated into the "conjectures and refutations" framework in order to reinforce a realist's view of scientific methodology. Some issues which may be difficult for the realist's position are discussed. It is argued that there is no need for the evidential observation to mimic the phenomenon of interest; such a mimicry may even be counter-productive. A case is also made that questions about ecological validity are not relevant to the rationale of experimentation.

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04854-9.

Ambiguous data obtained by deception say nothing about social behavior. A balanced social psychology requires separating statistical hypotheses from substantive hypotheses. Neither statistical norms nor moral rules are psychological theories. Explanatory substantive theories stipulate the structures and processes underlying behavior. The Bayesian approach is incompatible with the requirement that all to-be-tested theories be given the benefit of the doubt.