Theoretical Background Research Articles

Looking on the Bright Side of Life

Abstract: Theoretical Background: Positive mental health is not simply the absence of a mental disorder. We need a better understanding of the development of mental health, particularly if we are to better understand prevention, remission, and relapse in the context of mental disorders. To date, no measurement tool exists that captures positive mental health for childhood and adolescence, building on a robust theory of positive mental health. Objective: This study develops a questionnaire to assess positive mental health in children and adolescents between 6 and 18 years of age, both in self-report and in external report, and analyzes its quality in a first small sample. Method: Based on established adult scales, we developed a new questionnaire. 83 children and adolescents aged 6 – 18 years ( M = 11.89, SD = 3.0; 66 % female) and 77 parents completed the new questionnaire and other questionnaires assessing positive mental health and psychopathology. Results: The questionnaire showed a unidimensional factor structure as well as very good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. High positive correlations with self-efficacy and life satisfaction as well as high negative correlations with anxiety and depression confirmed the very good construct validity, both in child and parent ratings. Discussion and Conclusion: The PMH-Kids provides evidence of excellent psychometric quality in this first evaluation attempt. The questionnaire is comparable to its adult pendant, enabling researchers to assess positive mental health across the lifespan.

The Pragmatic Functions of Honorifics in the Selected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant

The article "The Pragmatic Functions of Honorifics in the Selected short Stories of Guy de Maupassant" is a comprehensive study that aims to understand the pragmatic functions of honorifics in Maupassant's short stories. It provides a theoretical background, explores various honorific types, linguistic representations, and their functions, and examines the relationship between honorifics and politeness. The research methodology and data analysis section outlines the research approach, providing a framework for examining the pragmatic functions of honorifics. The analysis and discussion delve into specific instances in Maupassant's short stories, contributing to a deeper understanding of linguistic and social dimensions in his work.

Chiraltube, rolling 2D materials into chiral nanotubes.

Carbon nanotubes (NTs) are graphene sheets rolled into a 1D material, with a specific chirality that defines its structure and properties. Graphene has triggered the development of thousands of 2D materials, which in principle could also be rolled into 1D NTs. However, most of these NTs have not been proposed due to difficulties in the generation of atomic coordinates for chiral NTs from 2D materials with a non-hexagonal lattice or multi-layered materials. In this paper we present Chiraltube, an open-source Python code that allows the quick generation of a complete NT with any chirality from the unit cell of its original 2D material. We explain the inner workings of the code as well as the theoretical background on which it is built, generalizing concepts from the construction of chiral and achiral carbon NTs to work on any other 2D material. We show various examples of the resulting chiral NT structures built from phosphorene, MoS2 and Ti3C2, and present some analysis on the interatomic distortion in the outermost layers of these NTs, as well as the results of ab initio electronic structure calculations on a set of phosphorene NTs generated by the program, showing the immediate practicality and usefulness of the program. We also explore some limitations and details of the tool as well as further work to be done.

Cognitive archaeology, and the psychological assessment of extinct minds.

Evolutionary anthropology relies on both neontological and paleontological information. In the latter case, fields such as paleoneurology, neuroarchaeology, and cognitive archaeology are supplying new perspectives in prehistory and neuroscience. Cognitive archaeology, in particular, investigates the behaviors associated with extinct species or cultures according to specific psychological models. For example, changes in working memory, attention, or visuospatial integration can be postulated when related behavioral changes are described in the archaeological record. However, cognition is a process based on different and partially independent functional elements, and extinct species could hence have evolved distinct combinations of cognitive abilities or features, based on both quantitative and qualitative differences. Accordingly, differences in working memory can lead to more conceptual or more holistic mindsets, with important changes in the perception and management of the mental experience. The parietal cortex is particularly interesting, in this sense, being involved in functions associated with body-tool integration, attention, and visual imaging. In some cases, evolutionary mismatches among these elements can induce drawbacks that, despite their positive effects on natural selection, can introduce important constraints in our own mental skills. Beyond the theoretical background, some hypotheses can be tested following methods in experimental psychology. In any case, theories in cognitive evolution must acknowledge that, beyond the brain and its biology, the human mind is also deeply rooted in body perception, in social networks, and in technological extension.

Forecasting Energy Consumption with AI: A Review for Sustainable Energy Management

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) within the context of Industry 4.0, emphasizing its transformative impact on various industries and its specific applications in energy consumption forecasting for sustainable energy management. Beginning with a historical perspective on industrial evolution, from automation to the current cyber-physical systems era, the review highlights the pivotal role of AI in reshaping manufacturing processes. The article explores the diverse applications of AI in the energy sector, particularly its effectiveness in short-term load forecasting, demand response optimization, and accurate predictions for renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The growing complexity of power systems due to decentralization and the proliferation of grid-connected devices is discussed, underscoring the importance of effective information exchange facilitated by AI. Additionally, the review delves into various models used for energy forecasting, including supervised learning models, artificial neural networks, and deep learning models. The practical applications of AI in power system control, management, energy market pricing, and policy recommendations are outlined, showcasing its potential in optimizing energy efficiency and balancing electricity production and consumption. The practical examples of AI's role in improving predictions of supply and demand, such as Google's subsidiary DeepMind enhancing wind power output forecasts, highlight the real-world impact of these technologies. However, the abstract also acknowledges existing challenges, including insufficient theoretical background, practical expertise, and financial constraints hindering widespread AI adoption in the energy industry. In conclusion, the article offers valuable insights into the current state, challenges, and potential of AI in forecasting energy consumption, providing a roadmap for sustainable energy management across diverse industries.

Fostering the Adoption and Use of Super App Technology

Super application (super app) is a technology that integrates different functionalities for users to access various services in one umbrella app. In recent years, mobile users have become interested in accessing several services by installing a single app while the super app technology is a new business model and has not yet been fully utilized. Therefore, it is essential to identify the motives affecting the adoption and use of super app as a disruptive technology that requires nonsuper apps to reform. In this regard, this research scrutinizes the impact of three main motives: 1) hedonic benefit, 2) utilitarian benefits, and 3) social benefit on the adoption and use of super app technology. We considered user satisfaction and engagement in adopting super apps as mediators. To address this point, this study integrates the technology acceptance model and Social Construction of Technology theory to develop a theoretical background. The results illustrate that quality positively affects the adoption of super app only through satisfaction while social benefit positively affects super app adoption through engagement.

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ АСПЕКТЫ ПОСТРОЕНИЯ СИСТЕМ КОМПЛАЕНС-КОНТРОЛЯ В НЕФИНАНСОВОЙ СФЕРЕ

The implementation of compliance systems in the non-financial sector is the basis for sustainable business development. Non-compliance with business standards can at any time put an end to the existence of the business as such and lead to catastrophic consequences for the entrepreneur. The purpose of this article is to summarize the theoretical background of the concepts of compliance control systems in the non-financial field. The article shows the genesis of the concepts of compliance risk and compliance control, identifies the main types of compliance risks, identifies the main directions of compliance in an enterprise, shows the relationship between compliance risks and types of losses in an enterprise, generalizes approaches to defining compliance control systems, identifies participants in the compliance system. As a conclusion, typical indicators of the effectiveness of compliance control systems at an enterprise are given.

SENIOR CITIZENS’ COUNCILS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF PUBLIC GOVERNANCE IN POLAND

The aim of the article is to present senior citizens’ councils in Poland in the context of the functions they fulfil in the design and implementation of public policies at the local level. The article presents the results of a pilot study on the activities of municipal senior citizens’ councils in Poland. The theoretical background for the conducted research is public governance as a process of making decisions on activities relevant to local communities. In this approach, the governance method was used to extend the catalogue of actors involved in this process. Senior citizens’ councils are institutionalised advisory, consultative and initiative bodies involved in the governance process.

Intelligence Augmentation and capability co-elevation in healthcare enabled by reasoned transparency

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems in healthcare can have a significant impact on the performance of the actors involved, encouraging, for example, increasingly early diagnoses, personalized treatments and more accurate data management and processing techniques. However, these results may depend on increasingly profitable human-machine interactions, Intelligence Augmentation, and potential in terms of capability co-elevation. Starting from this assumption, this study aims to understand which can be the Intelligence Augmentation and capability co- elevation driver in healthcare. This conceptual paper has been carried out with the conceptual goal of delineating, so, to address the research question, a deductive reasoning approach was applied and the methodological approach followed has been based on the description of the theoretical background, definition of evidence from an illustrative case, Livongo Health, addressed by analyzing secondary data extrapolated from the website contents, and development conclusions. From the illustration case, insights have been outlined to understand how to achieve the objectives of Intelligence Augmentation and capability co-elevation: it has been observed how the reasoned transparency in AI systems can be understood as an enabling factor.

Evolutionary Structure Conservation and Covariance Scores.

Effective homology search for non-coding RNAs is frequently not possible via sequence similarity alone. Current methods leverage evolutionary information like structure conservation or covariance scores to identify homologs in organisms that are phylogenetically more distant. In this chapter, we introduce the theoretical background of evolutionary structure conservation and covariance score, and we show hands-on how current methods in the field are applied on example datasets.

The effect of corporate social responsibility dimensions on accounting information quality: Empirical study in Saudia Arabia

Accounting studies neglected to link corporate social responsibility to accounting information, the theoretical background revealed the study gap and the paper referred to it in the question: Do the corporate social responsibility CSR dimensions affect the accounting information quality? The study aimed to reveal the effect of corporate social responsibility dimensions (economic, ethical, legal, and philanthropic) on accounting information quality (relevance and reliability) in banks in the Riyadh Governorate in Saudi Arabia. The researcher used a questionnaire to collect data from the study sample, and the data analysis was done using SPSS and smart partial least squares (pls), and its reliability and validity have been confirmed. Result revealed a positive effect of CSR (economic, ethical) dimension on the relevance of accounting information, a negative effect of CSR Legal dimension on the relevance of accounting information, and no effect of CSR philanthropic dimension on the relevance of accounting information, a positive effect of CSR (ethical, philanthropic) dimension on the reliability of accounting information and no effect of CSR economic and legal dimension on the reliability of accounting information.

Thermal recovery test for determining the thermal conductivity of the soil

This paper presents a new in-situ experimental procedure for determining a thermal conductivity of soil, as one of the thermophysical properties necessary for dimensioning vertical buried heat exchangers of geothermal heat pumps. The proposed method, called the thermal recovery test, is based on the assumption that there is a direct analogy between the hydrodynamic process of filling (recovery) the well with water from a porous aquifer after its partial or complete discharging and the process of establishment of thermal equilibrium in an infinite medium previously disturbed by a line heat sink (source). Apart from presentation the theoretical background of these two phenomena, the display of the identical theoretical logarithmic character of the change of hydrostatic pressure and soil temperature, description of the experimental procedure, the experimental results of three performed experiments are also presented. Additionally, results for the experimentally obtained values of the thermal conductivity of the soil are compared with those obtained from the thermal response test, and the advantages and drawbacks of the new thermal recovery test method are analyzed.

Feature-Based Interpolation and Geodesics in the Latent Spaces of Generative Models.

Interpolating between points is a problem connected simultaneously with finding geodesics and study of generative models. In the case of geodesics, we search for the curves with the shortest length, while in the case of generative models, we typically apply linear interpolation in the latent space. However, this interpolation uses implicitly the fact that Gaussian is unimodal. Thus, the problem of interpolating in the case when the latent density is non-Gaussian is an open problem. In this article, we present a general and unified approach to interpolation, which simultaneously allows us to search for geodesics and interpolating curves in latent space in the case of arbitrary density. Our results have a strong theoretical background based on the introduced quality measure of an interpolating curve. In particular, we show that maximizing the quality measure of the curve can be equivalently understood as a search of geodesic for a certain redefinition of the Riemannian metric on the space. We provide examples in three important cases. First, we show that our approach can be easily applied to finding geodesics on manifolds. Next, we focus our attention in finding interpolations in pretrained generative models. We show that our model effectively works in the case of arbitrary density. Moreover, we can interpolate in the subset of the space consisting of data possessing a given feature. The last case is focused on finding interpolation in the space of chemical compounds.

Theoretical Background of NTMs

Theoretical Background of NTMs

Brain Network Classification for Accurate Detection of Alzheimer's Disease via Manifold Harmonic Discriminant Analysis.

Mounting evidence shows that Alzheimer's disease (AD) manifests the dysfunction of the brain network much earlier before the onset of clinical symptoms, making its early diagnosis possible. Current brain network analyses treat high-dimensional network data as a regular matrix or vector, which destroys the essential network topology, thereby seriously affecting diagnosis accuracy. In this context, harmonic waves provide a solid theoretical background for exploring brain network topology. However, the harmonic waves are originally intended to discover neurological disease propagation patterns in the brain, which makes it difficult to accommodate brain disease diagnosis with high heterogeneity. To address this challenge, this article proposes a network manifold harmonic discriminant analysis (MHDA) method for accurately detecting AD. Each brain network is regarded as an instance drawn on a Stiefel manifold. Every instance is represented by a set of orthonormal eigenvectors (i.e., harmonic waves) derived from its Laplacian matrix, which fully respects the topological structure of the brain network. An MHDA method within the Stiefel space is proposed to identify the group-dependent common harmonic waves, which can be used as group-specific references for downstream analyses. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in stratifying cognitively normal (CN) controls, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD.

Chinese urban consumers' experience and consumption behavior with edible non-wood forest products

Consumers globally have a long history engaging with edible non-wood forest products in both rural and urban settings, and involving diverse consumption practices. While edible non-wood forest products offer critical provisioning and cultural ecosystem services, current literature primarily emphasizes the conventional economic significance in rural areas, neglecting urban consumption patterns. This thesis aims to investigate the forms and drivers behind urban consumers’ experience and consumption behavior with edible non-wood forest products in the regional Chinese market. It explores urban consumer behavior around three key aspects: consumer purchasing, foraging, and pro-environmental consumption behavior of wild/cultivated non-wood forest products. Building upon the theoretical background of ecosystem services and the Motivation–Opportunity–Ability model, supported by the Theory of Planned Behavior model, this thesis lays out a conceptual framework of the driving factors of the consumption behavior. A mixed methods approach was employed methodologically, including the logistic regression analysis, a qualitative thematic analysis, and the structural equation model. The findings reported in three articles I-III reveal diverse patterns in urban consumer consumption behavior concerning edible non-wood forest products, emphasizing the urban-rural nexus around these products. Motivation, opportunities, and abilities emerge as key drivers of consumption behavior. Pragmatism and sustainability dominate self-consumption purchases for tea, while Chinese mianzi and renqing motives prevail in gift-giving (I). A greater diversity of motivation exists in berry-picking, particularly among younger urban families (II). Social norms and culture are influential in shaping consumer attitudes (I, II, III). High-quality product availabilities, convenience, services, and social media marketing channels offered by producers and distributors constitute vital consumption opportunities (II, III). Additional actors such as local networks will be supportive (II). Personal knowledge and consumer habits also shape consumption behavior (III). These findings provide managerial implications for farmers, marketers, and policy makers, encouraging further research in this area.

REVOLUTIONARY DISCOURSES IN A TIME CAPSULE: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF CANONICAL, INTELLECTUAL LITERATURE CONCERNING THE SOCIAL IMPACT AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INTERNET.

Whilst the internet’s development can be traced back to the 1940s (Turner, 2006; Flichy 2015), the rhetoric of a digital revolution primarily emerged during the early 1990s and mid-00s and was often produced by the US-based academic community which has been intrinsically involved with the advancement of the internet. The dominant conceptualizations put forward in their popular, scholarly writings about the technology’s past and future, became authoritative in our academic understanding of the internet’s social impact and significance. Subsequently, notions like ‘the electronic highway’ were adopted in legislative and popular discourse which, in turn, influenced how the internet was understood, designed, and used on a broader, societal level. Notable authors of these influential texts - Howard Rheingold, Nicholas Negroponte, Sherry Turkle, and Geert Lovink - wrote their findings based on their own experiences with internet initiatives and from their particular theoretical backgrounds and positionality. Most importantly, these texts present valuable information as if coming from a time capsule; often framed with a rhetoric of transformation, the writers themselves contribute to the idea of a revolutionary internet following optimistic notions of digital utopianism and technological solutionism, situated in a particular Zeitgeist. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how these revolutionary notions developed over time and what their grander impact was on our contemporary conceptions, in and outside the influential American context. This is achieved by conducting a critical, historiographical analysis of canonical, intellectual literature about the early internet and thus re-contextualizes it as historical traces itself.

A Study on the Potential of Site-Specific Theatre as Content for Liberal Arts Education

This study proposes a teaching model for liberal arts education utilizing site-specific theater and examines its implications. By exploring various theoretical backgrounds and practical examples related to place-specific theater, the course covers a variety of concepts and deepens students' knowledge of theater. Theoretical explorations are followed by practical activities that encourage creative and critical thinking and provide opportunities to exercise the theatrical imagination. Practical activities provide learners with important experiences that allow them to see everyday spaces in a new light and to extend theater to personal and social meanings. There are also opportunities for students to watch and critique the work of other learners and to reflect on their own work in order to consolidate their knowledge and experience and to acquire new questions. The whole process is an educational one that leads to embodied knowledge. This study argues that theater, especially place-specific theater, is suitable content for liberal arts education, promoting learners' creativity and critical thinking skills, and offering another model of practice.

SNS마케팅특성이 중국 외식기업의 신뢰, 기술수용의도 및 재구매의도에 미치는 영향

Based on the development of digital technology and the popularity of smartphones, the purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of SNS marketing characteristics on Chinese conscious enterprises. Based on the theoretical background, model and hypothesis of the study, 426 questionnaires were distributed to consumers who lived in China from July 3, 2023 to August 16, 2023. The data collected in this study were analyzed by SPSS25.0 statistical program, and the results were verified according to the significant level of frequency analysis, exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis and mediated effect analysis. As a result of the hypothesis verification, the influence relationship between SNS marketing characteristics, trust, technology acceptance intentions, and repurchase intentions all had a significant impact, and trust showed a media effect. Therefore, companies should study and explore marketing strategies that take into account consumers' various tendencies based on SNS characteristics, positively affect consumer confidence and corporate performance, and make more efforts to communicate with consumers.

The Reversal of Negro’s Stereotype Image in Audre Lorde’s Selected Poems: A Poststructuralist Study

The present study tackles the linguistic creative ability of Audre Lorde’s poetic language to change the concepts and perceptions of Negro image signification. It is a sensitive issue that is affecting the life of African American community, namely the Blacks. The researcher in this study aims for seeking vicissitude and reverse the black image signification to indicate it as a graceful one. Besides, the researcher aims to document the black’s agony out of the dominant conceptions by the harsh white society over them during 1960 and 1970. This is done through selecting poems from Audre Lorde’s ‘’Coal’’ volume as a Data analysis under approaching the poststructuralist Susan K. Langer and her book entitled ‘’ Philosophy in a new key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art’’ (1954). Therefore, the paper discusses a rooted and renewed problem, which is judging on skin color. The researcher applies in his investigation a quantitative descriptive methodology that starts with an introduction, literature view, Theoretical background and concepts that are affecting language and black culture in addition to Lorde’s poetic language quality. The study concludes that the signifier is not a must to represent the signified. This is true with Lorde’s call of the black ‘’Coal’, which is a source of fortune and energy, despite being black. Thus, it shows the importance of the self and the black identity.