Does a past conflict still sting? The influence of recall style and self-esteem on the impact of conflict memories

The current research examined whether the impact of people\u27s past conflicts on their current relationships is associated with (1) the way people think about the conflicts, (2) their self-regard. Specifically, we expected that people\u27s relationships should be more negatively influenced if they recall conflicts in a vivid manner, focusing on how the conflicts happened and recalling them in vivid detail, rather than if they recall conflicts in a pallid manner, focusing on why the conflict occurred and recalling little detail. We also predicted that past conflicts are more likely to adversely affect the appraisals of the relationships of low self-esteem people than those of high self-esteem people. Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. Participants recalled a past conflict with their partner in either a vivid or pallid manner according to the manipulation. Participants\u27 self-esteem and their subsequent evaluations of the conflict and their relationship were measured. The hypothesis concerning self-esteem but not the one concerning recall style was supported

Entanglement entropy of (3+1)D topological orders with excitations

Excitations in (3+1)D topologically ordered phases have very rich structures. (3+1)D topological phases support both point-like and string-like excitations, and in particular the loop (closed string) excitations may admit knotted and linked structures. In this work, we ask the question how different types of topological excitations contribute to the entanglement entropy, or alternatively, can we use the entanglement entropy to detect the structure of excitations, and further obtain the information of the underlying topological orders? We are mainly interested in (3+1)D topological orders that can be realized in Dijkgraaf-Witten gauge theories, which are labeled by a finite group $G$ and its group 4-cocycle $\omega\in\mathcal{H}^4[G;U(1)]$ up to group automorphisms. We find that each topological excitation contributes a universal constant $\ln d_i$ to the entanglement entropy, where $d_i$ is the quantum dimension that depends on both the structure of the excitation and the data $(G,\,\omega)$. The entanglement entropy of the excitations of the linked/unlinked topology can capture different information of the DW theory $(G,\,\omega)$. In particular, the entanglement entropy introduced by Hopf-link loop excitations can distinguish certain group 4-cocycles $\omega$ from the others.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures; v2: minor changes, published versio

Developing an underlying inflation gauge for China

The headline consumer price index (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This paper develops a new underlying inflation gauge (UIG) for China which differentiates between trend and noise, is available daily and uses a broad set of variables that potentially influence inflation. Its construction follows the works at other major central banks, adopts the methodology of a dynamic factor model that extracts the lower frequency components as developed by Forni et al (2000) and draws on the experience of the People's Bank of China in modelling inflation. The paper is the first application of this type of dynamic factor model for inflation to any large emerging market economy. Our UIG for China is less noisy but still closely tracks the headline CPI. It does not suffer from the excess volatility reduction that plagues traditional core inflation measures and instead provides additional information. Finally, when forecasting the headline CPI, our UIG for China outperforms traditional core measures over different samples

Purchasing Motivations Toward Counterfeit Luxury Goods on E-marketplaces

This research is designed to study consumers’ purchasing attitudes to counterfeit luxury goods on electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces). And two research hypotheses are proposed in this research. Based on data analysis of 243 samples, this study explores the dimensions of consumer attitudes (morality and law, accessibility, burden-bearing, function effectiveness, economical efficiency) and motivations (conspicuous psychology, rebel psychology, social identity, self-enjoying and cost performance) to luxury counterfeit goods on e-marketplaces. It is found that the major reasons for consumers to choose e-business channels to buy luxury counterfeits are convenience, information acquisition, product and service. In particular, the findings indicate that online consumers’ attitudes toward luxury counterfeit products significantly impact purchasing motivation; online consumers’ attitudes and motivations positively impact purchasing intention

Developing an underlying inflation gauge for China. Bruegel Working Paper 2014/11, 9 October 2014

This paper develops a new underlying inflation gauge (UIG) for China which differentiates between trend and noise, is available daily and uses a broad set of variables that potentially influence inflation. Its construction follows the works at other major central banks, adopts the methodology of a dynamic factor model that extracts the lower frequency components as developed by Forni et al (2000) and draws on the experience of the People’s Bank of China in modelling inflation

Total Nuclear Reaction Cross Section Induced by Halo Nuclei and Stable Nuclei

We develop the method for the calculation of the total reaction cross sections induced by the halo nuclei and stable nuclei. This approach is based on the Glauber theory, which is valid for nuclear reactions at high energy. It is extended for nuclear reactions at low energy and intermediate energy by including both the quantum correction and Coulomb correction under the assumption of the effective nuclear density distribution. The calculated results of the total reaction cross section induced by stable nuclei agree well with the 30 experimental data within 10 percent accuracy.The comparison between the numerical results and the 20 experimental data for the total nuclear reaction cross section induced by the neutron halo nuclei and the proton halo nuclei indicates a satisfactory agreement after considering the halo structure of these nuclei, which implies the quite different mean fields for the nuclear reactions induced by halo nuclei and stable nuclei. The halo nucleon distributions and the root mean square radii of these nuclei can be extracted from above comparison based on the improved Glauber model, which indicate clearly the halo structures of these nuclei. Especially, it is clear to see that the medium correction of the nucleon-nucleon collision has little effect on the total reaction cross sections induced by the halo nuclei due to the very weak binding and the very extended density distribution.Comment: 15 pages,2 figures. Communucations in Theoretical Physics, (2003) in pres