This study conceptualized digital competence in line with self-determined theory and investigated how it alongside help-seeking and learning agency collectively preserved university students’ psychological well-being by assisting them to manage cognitive load and academic burnout, as well as increasing their engagement in online learning during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Moreover, students’ socioeconomic status and demographic variables were examined. Partial least square modeling and cluster analysis were performed on the survey data collected from 695 students. The findings show that mental (...) load and mental effort were positively related to academic burnout, which was significantly negatively associated with student engagement in online learning. Digital competence did not directly affect academic burnout, but indirectly via its counteracting effect on cognitive load. However, help-seeking and agency were not found to be significantly negatively related to cognitive load. Among the three SDT constructs, digital competence demonstrated the greatest positive influence on student engagement. In addition, female students from humanities and social sciences disciplines and lower-income families seemed to demonstrate the weakest digital competence, lowest learning agency, and least help-seeking behaviors. Consequently, they were more vulnerable to high cognitive load and academic burnout, leading to the lowest learning engagement. This study contributes to the ongoing arguments related to the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and informs the development of efficient interventions that preserve university students’ psychological well-being in online learning. (shrink)

This study investigated the psychometric properties of an adapted Chinese version of Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor...

In recent years, more and more people are applying Convolutional Neural Networks to the study of sound signals. The main reason is the translational invariance of convolution in time and space. Thereby the diversity of the sound signal can be overcome. However, in terms of sound direction recognition, there are also problems such as a microphone matrix being too large, and feature selection. This paper proposes a sound direction recognition using a simulated human head with microphones at both ears. Theoretically, (...) the two microphones cannot distinguish the front and rear directions. However, we use the original data of the two channels as the input of the convolutional neural network, and the resolution effect can reach more than 0.9. For comparison, we also chose the delay feature (GCC) for sound direction recognition. Finally, we also conducted experiments that used probability distributions to identify more directions. (shrink)

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the mediational path of the influence of cultural orientation on the COVID-19 pandemic outcome at the national level and find out whether some culture-related factors can have a moderating effect on the influence of culture.MethodologyCultural dimension theory of Hofstede is used to quantify the degree of each dimension of culture orientation. The cross-section regression model is adopted to test if culture orientations affect the pandemic outcome, controlling for democracy, economy, education, population, age, and time. Then, (...) a mediational analysis is conducted to examine if policy response is the mediator that culture makes an impact on the pandemic outcome. Finally, a moderation analysis is carried out to determine how each control variable has moderated the influence.FindingsThe cross-section regression results showed that culture orientation influences the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic at the 99% confidence level and that among the six cultural dimensions, collectivism-individualism has the most significant impact. It has also been found that policy response is the mediator of cultural influence, and culture-related factors can moderate the influence.ContributionThe contribution of this research lies in developing the assertion that culture influences pandemic outcomes. Our findings indicate that collectivism-individualism culture orientation affects the effectiveness of epidemic controls the most among the six culture dimensions. Additionally, our research is the first to study the mediating effect of policy responses and the moderating effect of culture-related factors on the influence of cultural orientation on the pandemic outcome. (shrink)

Substantial evidence from experimental studies has shown that mating motivation increases men’s financial risk-taking behaviors. The present study proposed a new moderator, men’s past relationship experience, for this well-accepted link between mating motivation and financial risk-taking tendency. Heterosexual young men were randomly assigned to the mating condition and control condition, and they completed a set of financial risk-taking tasks and reported their past relationship experience. A significant main effect of mating motivation and a significant interaction effect between experimental conditions and (...) relationship experience emerged, suggesting that mating motivation increased financial risk-taking tendency only among men who have never been committed in a romantic relationship, rather than those who have had such experience. This moderating effect was replicated in two experiments. The present study contributed to the understanding of individual differences in the relationship between mating motivation and male financial risk-taking. The present findings also have important implications for financial industry and gambling companies to better target clients and advertise their high-risk products. (shrink)

In past decades, the subject atmosphere and mood has gone beyond the physio-meteorological and psychological scopes and become a new direction of aesthetics which concerns two sides of the same phenomenon. As the primary sensuous reality constructed by both the perceiving subject and the perceived object, atmosphere and mood are neither a purely subjective state nor an objective thing. Atmosphere is essentially a quasi-object pervaded by a specific affective quality and a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our outer life (...) experiences, while mood is a quasi-subject pervaded by specific objective quality and thus a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our inner life experiences. A practical dimension is thereby, from the outset, embedded in the consideration of both concepts. This is mainly characterized by actions and, correspondingly, ethical aspects, which concern the design and creation of atmosphere and thus the triggering of mood through works of art. Here, on the one hand, the process of artistic formation, long neglected in the European tradition, is given prominence as an aesthetic practice, and on the other hand, an interactive dialogue is effectively established between the artist, the work and the viewer. Due to the fact that atmosphere and mood, both as in-between, emphasize the interaction of the perceiver and the perceived from two sides, here the decisive question is: in what kind of environment do we live or participate and in what way do we experience it? The focus of aesthetics is now not on the conventional issue whether the environment is beautiful or gives us a sense of beauty, but on how the environment influences our feeling of being there (Befinden) through our own sensuality. Such an approach would contribute to a critical transformation in aesthetic methodology, namely from the ontological and/or epistemological what to the phenomenological and anthropological how. -/- The tension between atmosphere and mood, as revealed here, opens up a large space for exploring a new understanding of aesthetics. On this basis the special issue pursued to diversify this discussion on an international level. (shrink)

As a contemporary form of aesthetics of nature, Eco-aesthetics is dedicated to an aesthetic revision of the split between humans and nature in the process of modernization. Starting from the criticism that the current eco-aesthetic research is usually limited to a taste evaluation of natural beauty and that many studies pay little attention to practically reconstructing a new harmony between humans and nature under contemporary conditions, the article focuses on the following issue: a) To what extent can the approach of (...) Eco-aesthetics be theoretically re-formulated so that the perspective of traditional aesthetics of judgment, predominantly fixed on the experience and reflection of natural beauty, can be avoided? b) How can this reformulation contribute to recultivating and renaturing an environment in a widely urbanized world? Here the concept of ‘atmosphere’ which has been primarily developed by contemporary German philosophers emphasizes the interaction between bodily perception and the qualities of the surrounding environment is of particular significance for solving these issues. It is demonstrated that in atmospheric experiences the body embeds man, together with his multifarious ways of perception and sense experiences, into nature so that man and nature are interrelated with each other and merged into a unified whole. The eco-aesthetic meaning here transcends the framework of the beauty of nature and is characterized by an infinite range of perceptual possibilities towards the integration of the human situation and the environmental conditions. At the same time, the investigation of the conditions and forms of atmospheric creation will contribute to further extending the eco-aesthetic vision to the practical area. And it is not least this practical dimension that distinguishes the Eco-aesthetics from traditional aesthetic approaches to nature. (shrink)

Rapid and precise air operation mission planning is a key technology in unmanned aerial vehicles autonomous combat in battles. In this paper, an end-to-end UAV intelligent mission planning method based on deep reinforcement learning is proposed to solve the shortcomings of the traditional intelligent optimization algorithm, such as relying on simple, static, low-dimensional scenarios, and poor scalability. Specifically, the suppression of enemy air defense mission planning is described as a sequential decision-making problem and formalized as a Markov decision process. Then, (...) the SEAD intelligent planning model based on the proximal policy optimization algorithm is established and a general intelligent planning architecture is proposed. Furthermore, three policy training tricks, i.e., domain randomization, maximizing policy entropy, and underlying network parameter sharing, are introduced to improve the learning performance and generalizability of PPO. Experiments results show that the model in this work is efficient and stable, and can be adapted to the unknown continuous high-dimensional environment. It can be concluded that the UAV intelligent mission planning model based on DRL has powerful intelligent planning performance, and provides a new idea for researching UAV autonomy. (shrink)