The Matching Effect of Destinations’ Crisis Communication

The match between destinations’ crisis communication sources and crisis types, and their impacts on tourists’ travel intentions, has not yet been investigated. This research explored the effect of destinations’ crisis communication on tourists’ travel intentions based on different crisis types (i.e., victimized and preventable crises) and communication sources (i.e., from the government, businesses, and other tourists). Results showed that crisis type had a matching effect on the impact process of crisis communication sources on tourists’ travel intentions. In addition, the mediation effects of tourists’ heuristic processing and perceived safety on destinations’ crisis communication–tourists’ travel intentions were confirmed. This study uncovered a matching effect of destinations’ crisis communication sources and crisis types. Results offer valuable theoretical and practical implications regarding destinations’ crisis communication agendas, crisis communication systems, and strategies for alleviating negative consequences of crises.

Flow Field Characteristics and Experimental Research on Inner-Jet Electrochemical Face Grinding of SUS420J2 Stainless Steel

Electrochemical grinding (ECG) is processed by the combination of dissolution and grinding. It is very suitable for the processing of difficult-to-cut stainless steel, but its processing performance is restricted by the matching effect of dissolution and grinding. In this work, the processing of the torus surfaces of the stainless steel shaver cap was taken as the research object. A flow field model including the through-hole structure and the rotation of the grinding head was proposed to optimize the flow field distribution and promote the uniform dissolution of materials. The flow field simulation results showed that the rotational flow formed by the high-speed rotation prolonged the electrolyte flow path and was not conducive to the discharge of electrolytic products, and the reasonable selection of the diameter and distribution of the through-hole could reduce the velocity difference. The effects of rotational speed, feed rate, and inlet pressure on the flatness and surface roughness of the torus surfaces were experimentally investigated, and a better matching effect of dissolution and grinding was obtained. Moreover, the experimental results showed that the inner-jet ECG had a good prospect in the batch processing of high-hardness stainless steel parts.

Movement as a window to the mind: grasping adults’ perception and understanding of others’ goal-directed movements

<p>Did you know you are a mindreader? Most of us have a fundamental curiosity about people and are in fact engaging in the process of mindreading every day, as we navigate our social worlds. For instance, we often think about what other people are thinking. On a more basic level, we even predict others’ goals based on their actions, such as when they reach for and grasp objects in their environment. This thesis aimed to test and validate a classic action observation paradigm. In order to do so, three experiments were conducted to investigate action observation for goal-directed movements. In Experiment 1, adults' eye gaze was tracked as they viewed reach-to-grasp movements. Contrary to standard predictions, results did not replicate gaze proactivity according to a motor matching account. Rather, adults' eyes latched on to targets that were larger and/or nearer to the agent’s hand. A motor matching account would have predicted that grasp type (pincer grasp or whole-hand prehension) should cue gaze proactivity to the congruent target (i.e., small object or large object, respectively). In Experiment 2, adults’ reaction times were measured as they viewed the same stimuli, but presented in static rather than dynamic format. Similarly to Experiment 1, adults’ response times were faster to detect a target when it appeared over an object closer to the reaching hand, rather than an object farther away from the hand. Again, this was not in line with a motor matching account. Finally, in Experiment 3, adults’ explicit probability judgements were solicited for still frames taken from the original video stimuli. Yet again, a distance effect prevailed, whereby adults explicitly predicted that the agent’s hand would contact the closer of two objects, even when the hand was at rest (in the absence of any motor cue). Overall, these results imply that adults are applying non-motor heuristics during action observation. As such, the stimuli tested in these classical studies may not be fit for purpose, that is, they do not reliably show a motor matching effect during action observation in adults. The implications of these findings for future research and theorising are also discussed.</p>

Movement as a window to the mind: grasping adults’ perception and understanding of others’ goal-directed movements

<p>Did you know you are a mindreader? Most of us have a fundamental curiosity about people and are in fact engaging in the process of mindreading every day, as we navigate our social worlds. For instance, we often think about what other people are thinking. On a more basic level, we even predict others’ goals based on their actions, such as when they reach for and grasp objects in their environment. This thesis aimed to test and validate a classic action observation paradigm. In order to do so, three experiments were conducted to investigate action observation for goal-directed movements. In Experiment 1, adults' eye gaze was tracked as they viewed reach-to-grasp movements. Contrary to standard predictions, results did not replicate gaze proactivity according to a motor matching account. Rather, adults' eyes latched on to targets that were larger and/or nearer to the agent’s hand. A motor matching account would have predicted that grasp type (pincer grasp or whole-hand prehension) should cue gaze proactivity to the congruent target (i.e., small object or large object, respectively). In Experiment 2, adults’ reaction times were measured as they viewed the same stimuli, but presented in static rather than dynamic format. Similarly to Experiment 1, adults’ response times were faster to detect a target when it appeared over an object closer to the reaching hand, rather than an object farther away from the hand. Again, this was not in line with a motor matching account. Finally, in Experiment 3, adults’ explicit probability judgements were solicited for still frames taken from the original video stimuli. Yet again, a distance effect prevailed, whereby adults explicitly predicted that the agent’s hand would contact the closer of two objects, even when the hand was at rest (in the absence of any motor cue). Overall, these results imply that adults are applying non-motor heuristics during action observation. As such, the stimuli tested in these classical studies may not be fit for purpose, that is, they do not reliably show a motor matching effect during action observation in adults. The implications of these findings for future research and theorising are also discussed.</p>

A Multi-Marker Test for Analyzing Paired Genetic Data in Transplantation

Emerging evidence suggests that donor/recipient matching in non-HLA (human leukocyte antigen) regions of the genome may impact transplant outcomes and recognizing these matching effects may increase the power of transplant genetics studies. Most available matching scores account for either single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) matching only or sum these SNP matching scores across multiple gene-coding regions, which makes it challenging to interpret the association findings. We propose a multi-marker Joint Score Test (JST) to jointly test for association between recipient genotype SNP effects and a gene-based matching score with transplant outcomes. This method utilizes Eigen decomposition as a dimension reduction technique to potentially increase statistical power by decreasing the degrees of freedom for the test. In addition, JST allows for the matching effect and the recipient genotype effect to follow different biological mechanisms, which is not the case for other multi-marker methods. Extensive simulation studies show that JST is competitive when compared with existing methods, such as the sequence kernel association test (SKAT), especially under scenarios where associated SNPs are in low linkage disequilibrium with non-associated SNPs or in gene regions containing a large number of SNPs. Applying the method to paired donor/recipient genetic data from kidney transplant studies yields various gene regions that are potentially associated with incidence of acute rejection after transplant.

Shape–Trait Consistency: The Matching Effect of Consumer Power State and Shape Preference

Angular and rounded shapes are two important visual elements widely used in the design of product shapes and brand logos. By introducing the power state, a psychological variable that is inherently relevant to consumers' product choices, brand preferences, and decision-making, we propose that consumers' power state influences their shape preference. Specifically, compared to low-power consumers, high-power consumers respond more positively to angular as opposed to rounded shapes, because the angular shape facilitates the expression of competence (as opposed to warmth). Through four studies, we provide consistent support for our main predictions as well as the underlying processes. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that consumers experiencing higher power are more likely to prefer an angular shape over a rounded shape than those experiencing lower power through different research methods, research objects, and experimental materials. On this basis, studies 3 and 4 further explore the mechanisms underlying the observed effects. These findings contribute to sensory marketing and power research and provide important implications for visual design and advertisement development.

Impact of Crop Insurance On Cocoa Farmers’ Income: An Empirical Analysis From Ghana

Risk is associated with every sector of an economy, and the pervasiveness of risk in agriculture is not new to farmers; they have, over the decades, developed ways to minimize and cope with it. The question is whether traditional strategies employed by farmers are adequate to curb unavoidable natural disasters. The goal of this study is to see how crop insurance affects cocoa producers' incomes in Ghana. A well-structured questionnaire was delivered to a sample of 600 cocoa farmers in Ghana's Ashanti region, and data was collected using a multi-stage random sampling technique. Tobit, and Propensity score-matching effect estimators were used to assess crop insurance's impact on cocoa farmers’ income. The result indicates that crop insurance had a significant positive impact on cocoa farmers’ income in the Ashanti region. The study recommends that the government of Ghana, with urgency, design agricultural insurance policy that can capture various farmers in the country to enhance their income and reduce poverty. Again, insurers need to promote publicity through public seminars, training, and media advertising to improve farmer awareness and knowledge of the insurance scheme.

A stereo matching algorithm based on the improved PSMNet

Deep learning based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) has been successfully applied to stereo matching. Compared with the traditional method, the speed and accuracy of this method have been greatly improved. However, the existing stereo matching framework based on a CNN often encounters two problems. First, the existing stereo matching network has many parameters, which leads to the matching running time being too long. Second, the disparity estimation is inadequate in some regions where reflections, repeated textures, and fine structures may lead to ill-posed problems. Through the lightweight improvement of the PSMNet (Pyramid Stereo Matching Network) model, the common matching effect of ill-conditioned areas such as repeated texture areas and weak texture areas is solved. In the feature extraction part, ResNeXt is introduced to learn unitary feature extraction, and the ASPP (Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling) module is trained to extract multiscale spatial feature information. The feature fusion module is designed to effectively fuse the feature information of different scales to construct the matching cost volume. The improved 3D CNN uses the stacked encoding and decoding structure to further regularize the matching cost volume and obtain the corresponding relationship between feature points under different parallax conditions. Finally, the disparity map is obtained by a regression. We evaluate our method on the Scene Flow, KITTI 2012, and KITTI 2015 stereo datasets. The experiments show that the proposed stereo matching network achieves a comparable prediction accuracy and much faster running speed compared with PSMNet.

Is precise description in advertising always better than vague ones? – From an accessibility-diagnosability theoretical perspective

PurposeThere is always a matching effect in advertising persuasion – the information that matches product characteristics or target consumer characteristics is considered to be relatively more persuasive. Based on the accessibility-diagnosability theory, this paper discusses the influence of the matching degree between the information presentation (vague description and precise description) and product attribute (vertical attribute and horizontal attribute) on people's attitudes toward advertising.Design/methodology/approachStudy 1 aims to explore the impact of the matching effect of different information presentation methods (precise presentation vs vague presentation) and product attribute (horizontal attribute vs vertical attribute) on consumers' attitudes toward advertising; secondary data was used to support this research. Study 2 mainly used the situational simulated experiment to examine the results of study 1, and further explored the mediating mechanism of its matching effect.FindingsThe authors found that the matching degree between the information presentation method and product attribute will positively affect the fluency of advertising information processing, that is, the use of vague description of product vertical attribute can positively affect consumers' extraction fluency; while the use of precise description of product horizontal attribute can positively affect consumers' processing fluency, and both extraction fluency and processing fluency will positively affect consumers' attitude toward the advertisement.Originality/valueAn essential enlightenment of the research is that it sheds light on the interaction between product attribute (vertical attribute vs horizontal attribute) with the information presentation method (vague description vs precise description) from the perspective of accessibility-diagnosability theory, which explains consumers' information processing mechanisms in dealing with different advertising information.