Lingnan University

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the well-being of people across all age groups, with children being particularly vulnerable due to their reliance on stable routines and social interactions for healthy development. Guided by stress-coping theory, this study examines the impact of life stressors and social support on children’s subjective well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a large-scale, cross-national dataset of 20,047 children aged 7–15 from 20 societies, we assessed how various stressors and social support from friends, family, and teachers influenced indicators of subjective well-being, including life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and negative affect. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that virus-related stressors and pandemic-induced disruptions negatively impacted children’s subjective well-being. Conversely, social support from family, friends, and teachers was generally associated with better well-being. However, the role of social support in moderating stress was complex: while support from friends buffered the adverse effects of stressors on life satisfaction and positive affect, family support sometimes amplified the negative impact of stressors, demonstrating a reverse buffering effect. These findings underscore the critical role of life stressors and social support in shaping children’s well-being during crises and highlight the need for targeted interventions to strengthen social connections and support systems.

The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) concept is receiving increasing attention globally and has become an important consideration factor for corporate sustainable development. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the factors influencing corporate ESG performance. Firstly, the research background was elaborated, including the attention of governments, investors, and society to corporate ESG performance in the context of global sustainable development trends. The research objective is to provide theoretical support and practical guidance for enterprises to improve their ESG level, and to provide decision-making basis for investors. Through literature review, the current research status and shortcomings at home and abroad are sorted out, and literature research and case analysis methods are used for research. Analyzed the relevant applications of ESG ratings, including becoming a decision-making basis for investors globally, being used by companies for governance and performance improvement, and the influence and application scope in the financial industry. Explored the internal and external factors influencing corporate ESG performance, and provided recommendations for companies, investors, and regulatory agencies. Finally, an outlook on the future ESG performance of enterprises was provided. This study indicates that corporate ESG performance is influenced by multiple factors such as environment, society, governance, and supply chain finance. Improving corporate ESG performance requires joint efforts from businesses, governments, investors, and all sectors of society. In the future, ESG research should be further strengthened to promote sustainable development of enterprises.

Facing consumers’ growing environmental consciousness, retailers need to consider the environmental consequences when choosing between e-commerce and traditional retailing. We develop a game-theoretic model to study the retailers’ channel selection problem in the presence of consumer environmental consciousness in both monopoly and duopoly settings. We find that even though the existence of consumer environmental consciousness drives the retailer toward more eco-friendly channel strategies, there exist conditions under which the retailer’s optimal channel strategy is still misaligned with environmental and social interests. Furthermore, we show that an increase in consumers’ consciousness, though seemingly reducing consumer utility, can in fact be welfare-enhancing. A reduction in the unit environmental impact of a channel (traditional or e-commerce), on the other hand, may lead to lower social welfare due to the retailer’s insubstantial carbon abatement. Finally, contrary to the conventional wisdom that competition tends to increase social welfare, we show that with consumers’ environmental consciousness, retail competition may result in social welfare decline. Our policy implication is that even though the presence of environmentally conscious consumers pushes firms to internalize the environmental consequences of their channel strategies, environmental regulations are still necessary to achieve social welfare maximization.

Writing is closely related to contextual experiences about the topics. However, in traditional EFL writing classes, learners’ lack of in-depth experience in learning contexts may be the leading cause rendering students’ poor writing performance. To address this problem, a quasi-experimental study was conducted to investigate the impacts of a spherical video-based virtual reality (SVVR)-supported instruction approach on the improvement of writing complexity with deeper contextual experiences. Underpinned by the sociocultural theory, an experimental group (n = 31) and a control group (n = 31) from a Chinese university participated in a 16-week study where the experimental group received an SVVR-integrated writing instruction while the control group the regular writing instruction. Between-group effects were examined mainly through procedures of MANCOVA. The findings show that the proposed SVVR approach could significantly improve students’ writing complexity in terms of lexical complexity and syntactic complexity, lending pedagogical support to the application of SVVR in EFL writing classrooms.

This study investigates attitudes toward income inequality in China, challenging the prevailing perception that Chinese citizens are tolerant of inequality. Using data from a large-scale cross-national survey encompassing 30 countries, the study examines the unique position of China, where citizens express one of the highest average concerns about income inequality. These concerns have not evolved alongside the marketization of the Chinese economy since the 1980s. Our analysis reveals that Chinese attitudes toward inequality are more similar to those in post-socialist countries than in liberal capitalist societies. However, Chinese citizens also prioritize a fair society with minimal differences and favor an active governmental role in redistribution, aligning their preferences with those found in welfare-oriented market societies. The study further explores sociodemo-graphic predictors, finding that concern about inequality is particularly pronounced among males, highly educated, and older individuals, which may reflect system justification beliefs. Education is linked to stronger egalitarian preferences and support for government intervention, while age consistently exercises a positive effect on these attitudes, highlighting parallels with post-socialist rather than liberal capitalist or welfare states.

With their access to an unprecedented amount of streamed multimodal, multilingual content, it becomes increasingly common among Chinese social media users to translate and transcribe multilingual speech via the digital writing function of bullet comments (superimposed writing on a moving screen played simultaneously with the video). In this article, we look at “Konger” (“intentional mishearing”) to offer a timely discussion of amateur writing/literacy practice afforded by digital technologies. Leveraging unique affordances of Chinese characters (unlike alphabetic writing), when transcribing multilingual speech (from foreign speakers and Chinese dialect speakers) users deliberately select characters that deviate from their “original” meanings, often in unexpected, humorous and ludicrous ways. Adopting digital ethnography, thematic and textual analysis, we offer three case studies involving high-profile influencers who speak non-standard Putonghua with heavy regional accents. We argue that bullet comment users’ collectively produced and intricately orchestrated Konger writings recreate new layers of orality and serve diverse identity-making purposes within an increasingly commercialized Chinese social mediascape.

This article conceptualizes the community’s role in the provision of welfare by introducing the concept of a community welfare regime that varies globally across time and space. Four global community welfare regime ideal types, effective formal, effective informal, ineffective formal, and ineffective informal, are identified based on the dual dimensions of effectiveness and formality community welfare provision. Using this conceptualization, the article presents a typology that stipulates the interplay between the four theorized types of the community welfare regime and various global welfare regimes (Gough et al., 2004). The conceptualization of the community welfare regime holds the potential for conducting meaningful comparisons between different community welfare regimes within individual countries and across multiple welfare geographies. These comparative analyses can provide policymakers with valuable insights about the (in)effectiveness of community welfare provision, allowing them to develop policies that are firmly grounded in successful practices adopted by communities to effectively support vulnerable members of society and foster improved overall welfare outcomes, and can also serve as an avenue for Global South–North learning.

Macau, once a Portuguese colony, is now the Las Vegas of the Far East. As an economic decolonisation strategy, the central government of China legitimised the gaming industry in Macau. Many students and teachers were absorbed by casino work, resulting in a low higher education entry rate and sabotaging the city’s sustainable development. While few studies on the Macau student voice exist, the research has mostly adopted either an academician view or top-down surveys. This study explores how Macau university students voice their subjectivities in higher education. Using a combined theoretical framework of Foucauldian homo economicus and the postcolonial theory, this study interviews 17 Macau students from six local tertiary institutions triangulated by four teachers. The findings reveal that, under the influence of neoliberalism, Macau university students voiced their subjectivities as homo economicus, using the mentality of cost-profit to guide their educational practices. They were, however, simultaneously restrained by the performativity of the knowledge economy. Meanwhile, the Macau students’ subjectivities are sealed in a complex discursive matrix of coloniality and (neo)coloniality, not capable of thinking ‘outside the box’ and living a life distinct from Macau’s planned destiny as a casino destination. In conclusion, although we interviewed Macau students and amplified their voices, their perspectives remained confined to the defaults of neoliberal and (neo)colonial discourses.

Typically, deep network-based full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) models compare deep features from reference and distorted images pairwise, overlooking correlations among features from the same source. We propose a dual-branch framework to capture the joint degradation effect among deep network features. The first branch uses kernel representation similarity analysis (KRSA), which compares feature self-similarity matrices via the mean absolute error (MAE). The second branch conducts pairwise comparisons via the MAE, and a training-free logarithmic summation of both branches derives the final score. Our approach contributes in three ways. First, integrating the KRSA with pairwise comparisons enhances the model's perceptual awareness. Second, our approach is adaptable to diverse network architectures. Third, our approach can guide perceptual image enhancement. Extensive experiments on 10 datasets validate our method's efficacy, demonstrating that perceptual deformation widely exists in diverse IQA scenarios and that measuring the joint degradation effect can discern appealing content deformations. The codes are available at https://github.com/Buka-Xing/Dual-Branch-Image-Quality-Assessment .

Scientific collaboration between the Global North and South has expanded significantly over the last three decades. However, this expansion has yet to bring about equal international research collaborations (IRC) for all collaborating sides. Through a case study of a Ghanaian elite university, this study examines how these inequalities manifest in the IRC of Ghanaian higher education researchers, building on the theoretical lenses of neocolonialism and academic dependency. It collected data from the university’s researchers and administrators and national policymakers through in-depth interviews. Ghanaian higher education system is uniquely located in West Africa as one of the few English-speaking colonised countries. Its growing involvement in global research makes it an interesting case to explore the manifestations of neocolonialism and dependency in IRC. The findings suggest how colonial structures continue to play out in the IRC dynamics. Findings also reveal how academic dependency resulting from external and internal factors impacts IRC in the context of Ghana and how such dependency has reflected and moved beyond colonial legacies. We propose that collaborative and targeted policies should aim for a gradual road towards breaking the dependency, where the Global North is positioned to have the upper hand. A more equally grounded research collaboration is important for Ghanaian and overall African higher education.

This paper examines the relationships which exist between personality and second language learning and adds to the data available on the use of a highly respected personality indicator, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Language learning and academic success are both highly correlated with intelligence, but research suggests that the importance of intelligence declines after high school age, partly because of the stronger effects of personality. This study places emphasis on the importance of personality in learning success and examines research evidence on the issue, discussing some of the inconsistent results that have been obtained. A study of 100 Hong Kong university undergraduates was carried out to add to this research base. The instruments used were the MBTI for personality traits, the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (S.I.L.L.) for learning strategies and a standardized test for language proficiency. Significant statistical relationships were not found and the reasons for this are discussed.

In this paper, we propose a novel model for the decomposition of cartoon–texture images, which integrates the edge-aware weighted least squares (WLS) with low-rank regularization. Unlike conventional methodologies that depend on total variation-based penalty functions, our model represents cartoon images using an edge-preserving WLS penalty. This approach effectively enhances edges and suppresses texture through iterative updates of an edge-preserving weight matrix. For the texture component, we introduce a low-rank penalty function to capture the structured regularity of texture patterns. By leveraging the repetitive nature of texture, our low-rank models can accurately represent these components. We employ a prediction–correction approach based on a three-block separable alternating direction multiplier method to solve the minimization problem, providing closed-form solutions for all subproblems. We also provide a convergence proof for the proposed algorithm. Numerical experiments validate the efficacy of our proposed method in successfully separating cartoon and texture components while preserving edges.

This paper uses the wage increment approach to measure the social and private returns to educational investments in China at various educational levels and how they change over time. The social returns to the investments in higher education were found to be increasing over time whilst the returns to the secondary level were declining over time. This indicates that China should raise its annual investment in higher education vis-à-vis secondary schools. We also found that the private returns to undergraduate level were substantially smaller than those to secondary level. This may lead to under-enrollment in undergraduate education. The above divergences or imbalances, if not rectified, could give rise to increasing scale of skilled labor shortages at the time when the economy boomed.

This paper seeks a novel theoretical support for the analysis of volatility changes in macro fundamentals with a shift in exchange rate regime by incorporating Rotemberg’s sticky-price adjustment rule and the forward-looking Taylor monetary reaction function into a stochastic dynamic Mundell-Fleming framework. The model predicts that, with flexible prices, output and real exchange rate exhibit the same variability after a shift. Interest rates are more volatile and the inflation rate is less volatile under the float. With fixed prices, inflation and the interest rate volatility are unchanged. The real exchange rate is more volatile under the float. Volatility in output and money co-moves. Our theoretical findings shed some light on the diverse empirical results in the literature—exchange rate regime shift does not lead to a uniform change in macro volatility; country-specific factors such as the degree of price rigidity, among others, are influential as well.

Building on foreign literature about the attitude toward qualitative methods for psychology and combining with our local experience of teaching qualitative methods to psychology students, we revised and validated the original scale of Attitude towards Qualitative Research in Psychology (AQRP), generating Attitude Scale for Qualitative Research in Psychology (ASQRP). The scale was also applied to evaluate the effect of our course on qualitative methods for psychology. Three studies were conducted to explore, revise and validate the scale. In study 1, we translated and revised the original scale with eighteen items from the previous study. In a sample of 311 students enrolled in psychology courses, we surveyed and conducted a confirmatory factor analysis on four dimensions of the original scale. Among them, there was zero correlation between perceived lack of validity and qualitative orientation, while the two dimensions of the original scale were negatively correlated. The results of the fitness index were slightly away from expectations. In study 2, we added six locally adapted items to the scale and surveyed again to gain a sample of 249 psychology students. Exploratory analysis established a three-dimension structure of the Attitude Scale for Qualitative Research in Psychology (ASQPR) containing “perceived lack of validity,” “capturing the lived experience,” and “time- and resource- intensive,” with twenty-two items remaining and the dimension of “qualitative orientation” in the original scale reduced. Correlations between the ASQPR and Knowledge about Qualitative Research Scale and Psychology as a Science Scale showed acceptable validity. In study 3, the ASQPR was applied to assess students’ learning outcomes who took part in the psychological qualitative methods courses for a semester. We used a pretest-posttest design to track the attitude changes in three samples of students (179 in total). After the course, students increased their knowledge about qualitative research and realized the advantages of qualitative approach (i.e., capturing the lived experience) and quantitative approach. They also generally think of qualitative research as time and resource-demanding. However, the ingrained perception of qualitative research as lacking validity remained unchanged. In sum, the current study developed a tool suitable for Chinese students to assess their attitudes towards qualitative research, which can assist in curriculum reform and construction involving teaching qualitative methods.