Teacher Vitality and Positive Teacher-Student Relationships: A Study of Emotional Transmission between Teachers and Students

The interaction between teachers and students has long been a vital research question among educational researchers. In recent years, incremental attention has been paid to the impact of positive psychological traits and emotions of teachers on teacher-student interactions. Drawing on the vitality theory, this study posited that the vitality of teachers contributed to enhancing students’ vitality and fostering positive teacher-student relationships via the emotional transmission effect, particularly through students’ perception of teacher enthusiasm. This hypothesis was empirically examined with a sample of 2,386 Chinese secondary school students and 76 head teachers

A Novel Self-Adaptive Harmony Search Algorithm

The harmony search algorithm is a music-inspired optimization technology and has been successfully applied to diverse scientific and engineering problems. However, like other metaheuristic algorithms, it still faces two difficulties: parameter setting and finding the optimal balance between diversity and intensity in searching. This paper proposes a novel, self-adaptive search mechanism for optimization problems with continuous variables. This new variant can automatically configure the evolutionary parameters in accordance with problem characteristics, such as the scale and the boundaries, and dynamically select evolutionary strategies in accordance with its search performance. The new variant simplifies the parameter setting and efficiently solves all types of optimization problems with continuous variables. Statistical test results show that this variant is considerably robust and outperforms the original harmony search (HS), improved harmony search (IHS), and other self-adaptive variants for large-scale optimization problems and constrained problems

Valuing Cultural Differences in Behavioral Economics

Behavioral economic research has tended to ignore the role of cultural differences in economic decision-making. The authors suggest that a systematic bias affects existing behavioral economic theory-- cognitive biases are often assumed to be universal. To examine how cultural background informs economic decision-making, and to test framing effects, morality effects, and out-group effects in a cross-cultural study, the authors conducted an experiment in the United States and China. The experiment was designed to test cultural and cognitive effects on a fundamental economic phenomenon-- how people estimate the financial values of objects over time. Results of the experiment demonstrated dramatic cultural differences in financial value estimations, as well as on the influence of variables such as framing effects. Chinese participants made higher object value estimates than Americans did, even when adjusting for differing national inflation rates. In addition, the results showed that contextual information, such as framing, morality information, and group membership affected judgments of financial values in complex ways, particularly for Chinese participants. The results underscore the importance of understanding the influence of cultural background on economic decision-making. The authors discuss the results in the context of behavioral law and economics, and propose that importing cultural competence into behavioral models can lead to cognitive debiasing, both temporary and permanent

Variational Iteration Method for Solving the Generalized Degasperis-Procesi Equation

We introduce the variational iteration method for solving the generalized Degasperis-Procesi equation. Firstly, according to the variational iteration, the Lagrange multiplier is found after making the correction functional. Furthermore, several approximations of un+1(x,t) which is converged to u(x,t) are obtained, and the exact solutions of Degasperis-Procesi equation will be obtained by using the traditional variational iteration method with a suitable initial approximation u0(x,t). Finally, after giving the perturbation item, the approximate solution for original equation will be expressed specifically