Stressful eating indulgence by Generation Z: a cognitive conceptual framework of new age consumers’ obesity

Purpose: To delineate the phenomenon of stressful eating within generation Z due to the times they are living in. To extract propositions which elucidate phases of stressful eating within Zers. Methodology: Based on relevant literature on consumer obesity, theories of pure impulse buying and reasoned action, cognitive constructs eminent for reasoned conditioned behaviour is extracted. Followed by extraction of the reasoned conditioned behaviour and its cognitive constructs within Zers. Thereafter a conceptual framework is developed with propositions of stressful eating within Zers. Findings: Zers indulge in reasoned conditioned behaviour initially owing to their healthy understanding insights, and the activations of cognitive capacities within them due to the law of effect. The law of effect is cyclical after the first reasoned consumption among Zers, leading to obesity and constricting self-controlling behaviour. Originality Value: It is the first study that provides a deep understanding of the cognitive mechanism orienting generation Z’s stressful eating indulgence even though they have higher healthy lifestyle understandings

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationOver the past 50 years, there has been a gradual upward trend in overweight and obesity prevalence, such that current epidemiological estimates indicate that over one-third of U.S. adults are obese and another third are overweight. Cancer prevalence has risen in tandem with excess adiposity in a dose response relationship that may grow stronger with age, suggesting a number of U.S. adults may be at risk. However, prevailing weight loss interventions aimed at disrupting and reversing this alarming trend are predominantly based on an overly simplistic model of energy balance, and consequently have failed to achieve any meaningful long-term results. This may be due in part to interventive focus on the symptomatic expression of excess weight rather than the underlying mechanisms of obesity onset and maintenance. Conversely, identifying malleable traits that promote healthier body composition profiles, as well as their potential mechanistic and behavioral means of conferring clinical benefits, may facilitate the development of the next generation of targeted psychosocial interventions for obesity. Herein is presented an integrated biopsychosocial framework that elucidates cybernetic feedback circuits between stress, reward, homeostatic mechanisms, and both bottom-up and top-down self-regulatory processes that interact to govern obesogenic behaviors. A portion of this conceptual framework was then tested in a correlational study of a sample of overweight and obese female cancer survivors, which revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness was indirectly associated with reduced adiposity via enhanced capacity to savor nonfood rewards and improved autonomic regulation during attention to food cues. Finally, findings from an early stage pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) are presented. This RCT investigated the preliminary feasibility and efficacy of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), a multimodal intervention designed to target mechanisms underpinning appetitive dysregulation, as an added component to exercise and nutrition counseling to treat excess adiposity among the same sample. Findings revealed that MORE may be an efficacious means of effectively targeting underlying mechanisms explicated by the proposed conceptual framework, in that MORE was associated with significantly enhanced interoceptive awareness, savoring, and responsiveness to natural rewards, and reduced food attentional biases and maladaptive eating behaviors

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Serious Games and Mixed Reality Applications for Healthcare

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have long histories in the healthcare sector, offering the opportunity to develop a wide range of tools and applications aimed at improving the quality of care and efficiency of services for professionals and patients alike. The best-known examples of VR–AR applications in the healthcare domain include surgical planning and medical training by means of simulation technologies. Techniques used in surgical simulation have also been applied to cognitive and motor rehabilitation, pain management, and patient and professional education. Serious games are ones in which the main goal is not entertainment, but a crucial purpose, ranging from the acquisition of knowledge to interactive training.These games are attracting growing attention in healthcare because of their several benefits: motivation, interactivity, adaptation to user competence level, flexibility in time, repeatability, and continuous feedback. Recently, healthcare has also become one of the biggest adopters of mixed reality (MR), which merges real and virtual content to generate novel environments, where physical and digital objects not only coexist, but are also capable of interacting with each other in real time, encompassing both VR and AR applications.This Special Issue aims to gather and publish original scientific contributions exploring opportunities and addressing challenges in both the theoretical and applied aspects of VR–AR and MR applications in healthcare

燒炭自殺在東亞國家的流行散佈: 趨勢分析

The Abstract Book can be viewed at: http://www.sop.org.tw/book/download/Summary2013.pdfConference Theme: Focusing on Mental Health, Life Care and Social Network in the ElderlyObjective: Suicides by carbon monoxide poisoning resulting from burning barbecue charcoal reached epidemic levels in Hong Kong and Taiwan within 5 years in the early 2000s. Methods: We used data for suicides by gases other than domestic gas in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea (1995-2010), Taiwan (1995-2011), and Singapore (1996-2011) to systematically investigate the spread of this method in East Asia. Graphical and joinpoint regression analyses were used to examine suicide trends and Poisson regression analysis to study sex- and age-specific patterns. Results: In 1995/1996, charcoal-burning suicides accounted for < 1% of all suicides in all study countries, except around 5% in Japan, but they increased to account for 14%, 28%, 13%, 4.3%, and 3.4% of all suicides in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore respectively in 2010. Rises were first seen in Hong Kong in 1999, followed by Singapore in 2000, Taiwan in 2001, Japan in 2003, and South Korea in 2008. There was some evidence for an impact on overall suicide trends in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan (females), but not in Japan (males), South Korea, and Singapore. Rates of change did not differ by sex/age group in Taiwan and Hong Kong but were greatest in young people in Japan and middleaged men and young women in South Korea. Conclusion: Variations in the timing, scale and sex/age pattern of the epidemic appear to be influenced by the media reporting of charcoal-burning suicide, whilst other factors such as the characteristics of the first or first few cases, language and ulture, familiarity and accessibility with the method, and socio-economic conditions may also play a role. Strategies to limit the epidemic spread of new suicide methods include surveillance to enable the early identification of the emergence of such methods, responsible media reporting and restrictions on Internet sites giving technical information about the method