Medical informed consent stands as an ethical and legal requisite preceding any medical intervention. Hospitalized patients face functional health literacy (FHL) challenges when dealing with informed consent forms (ICFs). The legitimacy of ICFs and informed consent procedures in China remains substantially undisclosed. The study’s aim was to investigate if Chinese patients have adequate FHL to be truly informed before providing medical consent. In this cross-sectional, structured interview-based study, FHL was assessed within the context of the informed consent scenarios in two (...) teaching hospitals (a 1500-bed general tertiary hospital and a 700-bed cancer hospital) affiliated with Shantou University Medical College. Twenty-seven patients admitted across clinical departments, along with their relatives (n = 59), were enrolled in the study after obtaining informed consent. The participants underwent a three-step assessment with two selected ICFs —teach-back skills, perceived understanding (perception), and informed knowledge (cognizance), with each component carrying a maximum score of 10. Data were analyzed with SPSS (version 22.0) for descriptive and inferential statistics, with consideration of significant P values as < 0.05. The median age (IQR and range) of participants was 35.5 (28 – 49 and 13 – 74) years. Most participants had only high school education (24.4%, 21/86) or below high school education (47.7%, 41/86). The median score (IQR) of FHL assessments—teach-back, perception, and cognizance—was 4.0 (2.5, 5.8), 8.0 (6.8, 8.8), and 6.5 (5.5, 8.0) out of 10, respectively. A moderate correlation was observed between the scores of cognizance and teach-back (r = 0.359, P = 0.002) or perception (r = 0.437, P < 0.001). Multivariate linear regression analysis predicted being a patient and having lower education levels as independent risk factors of inadequate FHL (Ps = 0.001). Lack of patient-centeredness in ICFs, time constraints, and poor clinical communication were identified as barriers impeding informed consent. This study demonstrates inadequacy in personal FHL and impaired organizational HL, resulting in compromised informed consent in Chinese teaching hospitals. As a remedy, we propose improving the quality of ICFs and institutionally mandated outcome-focused training on informed consent for all concerned clinicians to enhance medical ethics, ensure quality health care, address patient values, and mitigate potential medical conflicts. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that regular exercise modulates motor cortical plasticity and cognitive function, but the influence of short-term high-intensity interval training remains unclear. In the present study, the effect of short-term HIIT on neuroplasticity and executive function was assessed in 32 sedentary females. Half of the participants undertook 2 weeks of HIIT. Paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to measure motor cortical plasticity via short intracortical inhibition and intracortical facilitation. We further adapted the Stroop task using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (...) to evaluate executive function in the participants. The results indicated that, compared with the control group, the HIIT group exhibited decreased ICF. In the Stroop task, the HIIT group displayed greater activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left orbitofrontal cortex even though no significant difference in task performance was observed. These findings indicate that short-term HIIT may modulate motor cortical plasticity and executive function at the neural level. (shrink)

Understanding the changing role of central banks and their recent novel policies is essential for analysing many economic and financial issues, ranging from financial regulation and crisis, to exchange rate dynamics and regime changes, and QE and prolonged low interest rates. This book features contributions by the world's leading experts on central banking, providing in accessible essays a fascinating review of today's key issues for central banks. Luminaries including Stephen Cecchetti, Takatoshi Ito, Anil Kashyap, Mervyn King, Donald Kohn, Otmar Issing (...) and Hyun Shin are joined by Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics and Political Science, whose many achievements in the field of central banking are honoured as the inspiration for this book. The Changing Fortunes of Central Banking discusses the developing role of central banks in seeking monetary and financial stabilisation, while also giving suggestions for model strategies. This comprehensive review will appeal to central bankers, financial supervisors and academics. (shrink)

本书内容包括:中国古代生态美学思想寻踪、西方文化生态资源撷英、民族文化生态美窥视、生态美的学理研讨、生态美的实证研究。.

The mechanism of how the COVID-19 global pandemic has affected the entrepreneurial intentions of college students remains unknown. To investigate the impact of the entrepreneurial environment on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions in the post-pandemic era, 913 college students were invited to complete a questionnaire. The data were analyzed with structural equation models. The conclusions revealed by the questionnaire are as followed: college students have retained some entrepreneurial intention in the post-pandemic era; the factors influencing the entrepreneurial intention include sex, (...) family entrepreneurial history, major, and education background; and entrepreneurial self-efficacy can play a major role to mediate the impact caused by the post-pandemic entrepreneurial environment on entrepreneurial intentions. The research conclusions provide important insights to improve college students’ entrepreneurial intentions in the post-pandemic environment. (shrink)

This paper presents an active fault-tolerant control strategy for quadrotor helicopters to simultaneously accommodate sensor faults and external disturbances. Unlike most of the existing fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control schemes for quadrotor helicopters, the proposed fault diagnosis scheme is able to estimate sensor faults while eliminating the effect of external disturbances. Moreover, the proposed fault-tolerant control scheme is capable to eliminate the adverse effect of external disturbances as well by designing a disturbance observer to effectively estimate the unknown external disturbances (...) and integrating with the designed integral sliding-mode controller. In this case, the continuous operation of the quadrotor helicopter is ensured while avoiding the unexpected control chattering. In addition, the stability of the closed-loop system is theoretically proved. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed scheme are validated and demonstrated through comparative numerical simulations of the quadrotor helicopter under different faulty and uncertain scenarios. (shrink)

Background: The Taiwan Nursing Accreditation Council has proposed eight core professional nursing qualities including ethical literacy. Consequently, nursing ethics education is a required course for student nurses. These courses are intended to improve the ethical literacy. Moral sensitivity is the cornerstone of ethical literacy, and learning moral sensitivity is the initial step towards developing ethical literacy. Objectives: To explore the effect of nursing ethics educational interventions based on multiple teaching strategies on student nurses moral sensitivity. Based on the visual, auditory (...) and kinaesthetic model, three strategies were developed for determining the programme components and corresponding learning styles. Research design: This was a quasi-experimental study. Participants: A total of 234 junior-college student nurses participated in this study. All participants were aged 18–19 years. Ethical considerations: The study protocol was approved by the institutional review boards of Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital. Only the participants who signed an informed consent form took part in the study. The participants were permitted to withdraw from the study at any point if they wished to do so without affecting their academic score. Results: The scores of Modified Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire for Student Nurses were significantly improved after the intervention of integrating multiple teaching strategies ( p =.042). Significant relationships were observed between the satisfaction scores of two teaching strategies and moral sensitivity. The results indicated that using multiple teaching strategies is effective for promoting nursing ethics learning. Conclusion: This strategy was consistent with the student nurses’ preferred learning style and was used to correct their erroneous ethical conceptions, assisting in developing their ethical knowledge. (shrink)

Although we can observe noticeable progress in gender diversity on corporate boards, these boards remain far from gender balanced. Our paper builds on social identity theory to examine the impact of corporate elites—men and women who sit on multiple corporate boards—on board diversity. We extend the main argument of social identity theory concerning favouritism based on homophily by suggesting that boards with men with multiple appointments are unwilling to include female board members to protect the monopoly value generated by their (...) elite status. The empirical analysis, based on DAX 30 firms in the period of 2010–2015, shows that the presence of multi-board men is negatively associated with women’s participation, while the presence of multi-board women and other women on management boards is positively related to gender diversity on boards. Furthermore, robustness tests support and confirm our conclusion that multi-board men have a significant association with board diversity, even with small size. Additionally, we find a significant effect arising from pressure related to the introduction of gender quotas in Germany, effective in 2016, indicating the effectiveness of gender quota policies for board gender diversity. (shrink)

Understanding the influencing factors of cyberbullying is key to effectively curbing cyberbullying. Among the various factors, this study focused on the personal level of individual students and categorized the influencing factors of cyberbullying among college students into five sublevels, i.e., background, Internet use and social network habits, personality, emotion, and literacy related to digital citizenship. Then a questionnaire survey was applied to 947 Chinese college students. The results show that cyberbullying among Chinese college students are generally at a low level. (...) There are many factors influence cyberbullying. Specifically, at the personal background level, gender has a significant impact on cyberbullying and being cyberbullied. In terms of personal Internet use and social network habits, students’ average daily online time has no significant correlation with cyberbullying and being cyberbullied; however, the proportion of online non-learning time has a significantly positive correlation with cyberbullying, and the proportion of online learning/work time has a significant impact on being cyberbullied. At the personality level, the Big Five personality traits have varying degrees of correlation with and influence on cyberbullying and being cyberbullied. At the personal emotions level, students’ life satisfaction has a significantly negative correlation with cyberbullying and being cyberbullied while it only has a significant impact on being cyberbullied; the personal stress and empathetic concern aspects of empathy have a significantly positive correlation with cyberbullying and being cyberbullied among female students. At the literacy related to digital citizenship level, students’ understanding of and compliance with Internet etiquette have significantly negative impacts on cyberbullying; the ability to communicate and collaborate online and Internet addiction have significantly positive impacts on cyberbullying and being cyberbullied; the understanding of and compliance with relevant digital laws and regulations have significantly negative correlations with cyberbullying and being cyberbullied. Overall, college students’ digital citizenship level has a significantly negative correlation with cyberbullying but no significant correlation with being cyberbullied. Finally, analysis and suggestions were provided according to these statistical results and the effects of these factors on cyberbullying and being cyberbullied among college students, so as to help solve this problem and provide a new perspective for research in this field. (shrink)

The fateful combination of (i) the Dunning‐Kruger effect (ignorance of one's own ignorance) with (ii) the nonlinear dynamics of the echo‐chamber between reviewers and editors fuels a self‐reinforcing collective delusion system that sometimes spirals uncontrollably away from objectivity and truth. Escape from this subconscious meta‐ignorance is a formidable challenge but if achieved will help correct a central deficit of the peer‐review process that stifles innovation and paradigm shifts.

Technological products such as computer, communication, and consumer electronic products, apps, smart wearables, and streaming services have become inseparable from people’s lives. In technological fields of practice, imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship may influence one another. A vivid imagination can generate creativity and trigger the entrepreneurial intention to “bring new things to the market.” This study aims to understand the formation of internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study explores and empirically tests how (...) technology product imagination disposition and social support impact internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Drawing from self-determination theory, this study proposes and examines the mediating role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the relationship between technology product imagination disposition and internet entrepreneurial intention, as well as the relationship between social support and internet entrepreneurial intention. We conducted a survey of 568 adults in Taiwan and used partial least squares to test our hypotheses. The results show the following: Technology product imagination disposition is positively associated with challenge, enjoyment, compensation, and outward motivation. Social support is positively associated with challenge, enjoyment, compensation, and outward motivation. Challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation are positively associated with internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products. Technology product imagination disposition intensifies internet entrepreneurial intention to use technology products by strengthening challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation. Social support intensifies internet entrepreneurial intention by increasing challenge, enjoyment, and outward motivation. The partial mediation model represents a significant improvement in the total effect over the direct effect. We discuss the implications of these results for research and internet entrepreneurship practices. (shrink)

According to experimental philosophers, the diversity and sensitivity of intuitions have posed a severe threat to the traditional philosophical methodology, which relies extensively on intuitions triggered by thought experiments. However, defenders of traditional armchair philosophical methodology argue that experimental philosophers misunderstand the importance of intuitions for philosophy. What philosophers genuinely rely on are arguments, which provide a reliable foundation for their judgments on thought experiments. However, a recent cross-cultural experiment conducted by Wysocki (2017) indicates that arguments do not affect the (...) judgments about Gettier cases as philosophers once expected. That poses a challenge to those philosophers who contend that judgments are based on arguments. In this paper, we expand the experimental investigation of the effect of arguments on judgments about thought experiments. We report the result of three experiments in which eleven thought experiments drawn from multiple philosophical subdisciplines were used. It turns out that arguments have significant impacts on Chinese participants’ judgments in response to most of these thought experiments. These results present new resources for defending the traditional methodology but also bring new challenges. (shrink)

One of the major divergences between dynamical systems theory and symbolism lies in their views on the role of representation in cognition. From the perspective of development, the cognitive development could be divided into three levels: sensorimotor, imagery representation and linguistic representation. It is claimed that representation is not a sufficient condition though it is necessary for cognition. However, it does not mean that the authors agree with the notion of strong coupling in dynamicism that completely rejects representation.

In 2016, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen officially apologised to the island’s indigenous peoples. This national apology not only plays a persuasive role in informing the general public about the historical wrongdoings inflicted on the Taiwanese aborigines, but also constitutes a therapeutic and restorative role in the process of reconciliation with the indigenous victims. This article provides a critical discourse analysis of President Tsai’s apology. In particular, it examines the power and ideology embedded in both the speech and the related ceremony, (...) and is supplemented with extracts from interviews with a cross-section of key stakeholders, such as a former Constitutional/supreme Court Justice, indigenous/tribal leaders and members/staff/advisers from the Presidential Office Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee. The analysis reveals that, despite President Tsai’s apology and reconciliation policies, instead of facilitating reconciliation, the apology appears to exacerbate the long-standing latent tension between indigenous and non-indigenous groups. While the apology opens a window for reconciliation, a higher level of commitment is required to promote structural and systemic changes, such as land restitution, before the apology can be deemed adequate. (shrink)

Fingerprint recognition is the most widely used identification method at present. However, it still falls short in terms of cross-platform and algorithmic complexity, which exerts a certain effect on the migration of fingerprint data and the development of the system. The conventional image recognition methods require offline standard databases constructed in advance for image access efficiency. The database can provide a pre-processed image via a specific method that probably is compatible merely with the specific recognition algorithm. Then, the specific recognition (...) algorithm starts the process of retrieving these specific pre-proessing images for recognition and inevitably will be blocked from other datasets. The proposed method in this research designed an embedded image processing algorithm based on a Siamese neural network in the recognition method that allows the proposed method to recognize images from any source without constructing a database for image storage in advance. In this research, the proposed method was applied to fingerprint recognition and evaluation of the proposed method was evaluated. The results showed that the accuracy of the proposed algorithm was up to 92%, and its F1 score was up to 0.87. Compared with the conventional fingerprint matching methods, its significant advantage in the FRR, FAR, and CR jointly indicated the remarkable correct recognition rate of the proposed method. (shrink)

Flight delay is one of the most challenging threats to operation of air transportation network system. Complex network was introduced into research studies on flight delays due to its low complexity, high flexibility in model building, and accurate explanation about real world. We surveyed recent progress about flight delay which makes extensive use of complex network theory in this paper. We scanned analyses on static network and temporal evolution, together with identification about topologically important nodes/edges. And, we made a clarification (...) about relations among robustness, vulnerability, and resilience in air transportation networks. Then, we investigated studies on causal relations, propagation modellings, and best spreaders identifications in flight delay. Ultimately, future improvements are summarized in fourfold. Under Complex Network, flight operation relevant subsystems or sublayers are discarded by the majority of available network models. Hierarchical modelling approaches may be able to improve this and provide more capable network models for flight delay. Traffic information is the key to narrow the gap between topology and functionality in current situations. Flight schedule and flight plan could be employed to detect flight delay causalities and model flight delay propagations more accurately. Real flight data may be utilized to validate and revise the detection and prediction models. It is of great importance to explore how to predict flight delay propagations and identify best spreaders at a low cost of calculation complexity. This may be achieved by analyzing flight delay in frequency domain instead of time domain. Summation of most critical nodes/edges may not be the most crucial group to network resilience or flight delay propagations. Effective algorithm for most influential sequence is to be developed. (shrink)

Language is central to the interactional nature of the social life within which it is situated. To react or respond in a particular situation, we must be able to recognize the social situation. Growing evidence has demonstrated the negative impact of perceived loneliness on late-life executive functions. Yet little is known about how social factors impact language processing for older people. The current study aims to fill this gap, first by assessing age-related changes in lexical processing during Chinese word reading, (...) second, by examining whether older adults’ individual differences, such as processing speed and verbal abilities, modulate meaning retrieval and, third, by investigating whether perceived loneliness can hinder word reading. The use of compound words in Chinese enables significant sublexical ambiguity, requiring varying executive load during word recognition: when a word’s constituent characters carry multiple meanings, readers must consider the meaning contributions of both constituent characters and use top-down word information to determine the most accurate meaning of the ambiguous character, a process termed “sublexical ambiguity resolution.” In this study, adults read real Chinese words and pseudowords, and they were asked to make lexical decisions. Older adults exhibited greater lexicality effects and similar sublexical ambiguity effects compared with young adults. Among older participants, processing speed could account for their ability to differentiate between words and pseudowords. In contrast, the level of perceived loneliness modulated the efficacy of sublexical ambiguity resolution: the participants with higher perceived loneliness displayed a greater sublexical ambiguity disadvantage effect. These results indicate that perceived loneliness may affect the use of contextual information in meaning retrieval during reading. The findings provide an important link between social connections and language processing. (shrink)

Smart homes create a beneficial environment for the lives of elderly people and enhance the quality of their home lives. This study aims to explore the design of age-friendly interfaces that can meet the emotional needs of self-care elderly people from the perspective of functional realization of the operating interface. Sixteen elderly users aged fifty-five and above were selected as subjects with healthy eyes and no excessive drooping eyelids to obscure them. Four representative age-friendly applications with different interface designs were (...) selected from the Android application market as the stimulus material for the experiment, and a total of fifteen pages were browsed independently. During the experiment, the ErgoLAB human-computer environment synchronization cloud platform was used to monitor and record the subjects' multidimensional physiological indicators of eye movements, skin electricity, and heart rate variability when using different styles of mobile application interfaces. Combined with the post-experimental PAD emotion scale data, the preferences of emotional interface design elements of the self-care elderly were analyzed to guide the subsequent design practice. The results show that: on the layout characteristics of the home page, a simple and intuitive multi-column layout or card layout combined with a bottom navigation bar type main navigation is used; on the choice of the main color, a single color with low saturation is used as the main color, with high saturation color accents to play a role in highlighting key information; on the information density of the home page, a moderate proportion of graphics and text is adopted, with low information density; on the arrangement of the page content, they try to give priority to information content with high user relevance. (shrink)

This study examines how the social climate of comparison in which a founder grew up impacts family business (FB) philanthropy, emphasizing the founder's role in FB decisions. With a dataset of 758 Chinese FBs, we find that the stronger the social climate of comparison in the founder's region of upbringing, the more charitable donations the FB tends to make. This effect is more pronounced in areas with a high concentration of FBs. The unspoken rules of Chinese society, related to ‘face (...) (Mianzi)’ and ‘favours’ significantly influence business decisions. (shrink)

Prediction is one of the major challenges in complex systems. The prediction methods have shown to be effective predictors of the evolution of networks. These methods can help policy makers to solve practical problems successfully and make better strategy for the future. In this work, we focus on exporting countries’ data of the International Trade Network. A recommendation system is then used to identify the products that correspond to the production capacity of each individual country but are somehow overlooked by (...) the country. Then, we simulate the evolution of the country’s fitness if it would have followed the recommendations. The result of this work is the combination of these two methods to provide insights to countries on how to enhance the diversification of their exported products in a scientific way and improve national competitiveness significantly, especially for developing countries. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship may be taught, and entrepreneurship education is flourishing at colleges and universities. However, previous documents show that entrepreneurship education is inconsistent with the research conclusions of entrepreneurial intention, which is a lack of discussion on the mediating effect of government subsidies from external resources. Based on the cognitive behavior theory, a mediating effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial strategy and entrepreneurial intention is built. By collecting the data of 334 questionnaires of college students in Pearl River Delta in China, (...) a structural equation is used for empirical analysis. The result indicates that entrepreneurship education does not have a significant influence on entrepreneurial intention; exploration innovation and exploitation innovation have a positive influence on entrepreneurial intention, and exploration innovation and exploitation innovation have a mediating effect on entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention; government subsidies have a positive regulating effect on exploration innovation, exploitation innovation, and entrepreneurial intention. In this article, the application of the cognitive behavior theory in the field of entrepreneurship research is expanded to provide the theoretical basis for building the entrepreneurship education ecosystem, which is conductive to innovation and entrepreneurship to promote regional economic development. (shrink)

Self-location—the sense of where I am in space—provides an experiential anchor for one's interaction with the environment. In the studies of full-body illusions, many researchers have defined self-location solely in terms of body-location—the subjective feeling of where my body is. Although this view is useful, there is an issue regarding whether it can fully accommodate the role of 1PP-location—the sense of where my first-person perspective is located in space. In this study, we investigate self-location by comparing body-location and 1PP-location: using (...) a head-mounted display (HMD) and a stereo camera, the subjects watched their own body standing in front of them and received tactile stimulations. We manipulated their senses of body-location and 1PP-location in three different conditions: the participants standing still (Basic condition), asking them to move forward (Walking condition), and swiftly moving the stereo camera away from their body (Visual condition). In the Walking condition, the participants watched their body moving away from their 1PP. In the Visual condition, the scene seen via the HMD was systematically receding. Our data show that, under different manipulations of movement, the spatial unity between 1PP-location and body-location can be temporarily interrupted. Interestingly, we also observed a “double-body effect.” We further suggest that it is better to consider body-location and 1PP-location as interrelated but distinct factors that jointly support the sense of self-location. (shrink)

The article discusses the conservative tendency of state Confucianism, particularly its celebration of political leaders and of the uniqueness of Chinese culture as an excuse to oppose Western values and reject political reform.

Imbued with profound historical consciousness, the Chinese people are Homo historiens in every sense of the term. To be human in China, to a very large extent, is to be historical, which means to live up to the paradigmatic past. Therefore, historical thinking in traditional China is moral thinking. The Chinese historico-moral thinking centers around the notion of Dao, a notion that connotes both Heavenly principle and human norm.In view of its practical orientation, Chinese historical thinking is, on the one (...) hand, concrete thinking and, on the other, analogical thinking. Thinking concretely and analogically, the Chinese people are able to communicate with the past and to extrapolate meanings from history. In this way, historical experience in China becomes a library in which modern readers may engage in creative dialogues with the past. (shrink)

Conceptual metaphors crucially shape how people understand and represent abstract concepts like love. Numerous Chinese linguistic metaphors associate love (beginning/continuing a romantic relationship) with red (e.g. 红豆相思) and lovelorn (breakup/end of a romantic relationship) with gray (e.g. 万念俱灰). However, empirical evidence supporting these color metaphors for love concepts is lacking. This study investigated the red-gray color metaphor for love concepts in Chinese. Experiment 1 used a Stroop test where participants categorized love/lovelorn words in red/gray fonts. Results showed significantly faster latencies (...) for love words in red versus gray fonts, but no difference for lovelorn words. Experiment 2 used an implicit association test (IAT), where the compatible block paired red squares with love words and gray squares with lovelorn words, and vice versa in the incompatible block. Results showed that participants implicitly associated love words with red colors and lovelorn words with gray colors. Together, these experiments provide novel empirical evidence that native Chinese speakers activate metaphorical red-gray color mappings for love concepts, contributing insights into how abstract love concepts are grounded in embodied experiences. Future research could explore color-love metaphors across cultures, paradigms, and gender-balanced samples. (shrink)

BackgroundSolution-focused model is an intervention method that fully mobilizes patients’ initiative through their potential. We aimed to investigate the effects of SFM on anxiety and postpartum depression in nulliparous pregnant women compared with routine care services.MethodsWe chose the mothers diagnosed as depressed or with depressive tendency by Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale at 28 weeks of gestation and divided them into the intervention and control groups. The control group only took the routine pregnancy healthy nursing, while the SFM group took the (...) regular nursing and SFM counselling. Different assessments were conducted at 28 weeks of gestation, post-delivery, and post-intervention to evaluate the anxiety and depression levels of the patients. Finally, nursing satisfaction was evaluated by the nursing satisfaction questionnaire.ResultsCompared with the control group, SFM could decrease the scores of anxiety and depression more effectively and influence sleep quality more positively. We also found that SFM resulted in significantly higher nursing satisfaction than that in the control group.ConclusionIn conclusion, SFM could effectively alleviate anxiety and PPD in nulliparous pregnant women. (shrink)

Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) plays a facilitative role in FL learning and its contributing factors have been the object of scholarly attention in the Positive Psychology approach to second language acquisition (SLA). The present study examined the predictive effects of gender and academic discipline on overall FLE and each of its subcomponents in a specific Chinese EFL context. Statistical analyses based on a sample of 1,718 high school students showed that: (1) female students scored significantly higher in overall FLE,FLE-Private, andFLE-Atmospherethan (...) their male counterparts, but no significant difference was found in theirFLE-Teacher; (2) students of Humanities and Social Sciences scored significantly higher in overall FLE,FLE-TeacherandFLE-Atmospherethan students of Natural Science, though no significant difference was identified forFLE-Private. Reasons for the statistical variations and their implications were also discussed. (shrink)

The way of our living and working has changed intensely throughout the past half-century. The era we live in is interlinked with rapid technological changes, paving the way for digitalization. The students are considered digital natives and are expected to have e-learning abilities to improve their academic effectiveness. However, digital readiness is an important factor that can play a valuable role in boosting students’ e-learning abilities and satisfaction. The previous studies of students’ e-learning abilities revealed the lack of students’ digital (...) readiness for academic achievements. Therefore, the present study aims to examine the role of digital readiness in the e-learning satisfaction of students. Based on the theory of motivation, the present study attempts to check the association of digital readiness with e-learning satisfaction. The current study also determines the relationship of digital readiness with entrepreneur psychological capital. Further, this study examines the correlation of entrepreneur psychological capital with e-learning satisfaction. The present study also assumes the mediating role entrepreneur of psychological capital and moderating role of mindfulness. For empirical analyses, this study gathered data from 376 music learning students of entrepreneur training institutes in China through a structured questionnaire method using a convenient sampling technique. This study applied partial least square structural equation modeling for empirical analyses using Smart PLS software. The present study confirmed that digital readiness positively correlates with e-learning satisfaction and psychological capital. The findings also acknowledged that psychological capital positively enhances e-learning satisfaction. The results also confirmed that psychological capital mediates the association between digital readiness and e-learning satisfaction. However, the outcomes revealed that mindfulness does not moderate the association between digital readiness and e-learning satisfaction. On the other hand, the findings acknowledged that mindfulness moderates the relationship between psychological capital and e-learning satisfaction. In addition, this study’s findings also serve the literature by providing important theoretical and practical implications. This study points out that digital readiness is an important antecedent to increasing students’ learning satisfaction and performance. The findings also suggest that students’ mindfulness could play a bridging role in enhancing their performance. (shrink)