Empathy is sharing and understanding others’ emotions. Recently, researchers identified a culture–sex interaction effect in empathy. This phenomenon has been largely ignored by previous researchers. In this study, the culture–sex interaction effect was explored with a cohort of 129 participants (61 Australian Caucasians and 68 Chinese Hans) using both self-report questionnaires (i.e., Empathy Quotient and Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and computer-based empathy tasks. In line with the previous findings, the culture–sex interaction effect was observed for both trait empathy (i.e., the generalized (...) characteristics of empathy, as examined by the self-report questionnaires) and state empathy (i.e., the on-spot reaction of empathy for a specific stimulus, as evaluated by the computer-based tasks). Moreover, in terms of state empathy, the culture–sex interaction effect further interacted with stimulus traits (i.e., stimulus ethnicity, stimulus sex, or stimulus emotion) and resulted in three- and four-way interactions. Follow-up analyses of these higher-order interactions suggested that the phenomena of ethnic group bias and sex group favor in empathy varied among the four culture–sex participant groups (i.e., Australian female, Australian male, Chinese female, and Chinese male). The current findings highlighted the dynamic nature of empathy (i.e., its sensitivity toward both participant traits and stimulus features). Furthermore, the newly identified interaction effects in empathy deserve more investigation and need to be verified with other Western and Asian populations. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether local religious beliefs have a significant impact on the practice of earnings management. We extend the existing literature on the role of firm characteristics in mitigating earnings management by showing that local religious beliefs significantly impact the practice of earnings management. Specifically, exploring firms located in the U.S. counties that vary from 2000 through 2010, we document the negative relationship between religiosity and earnings management using multivariate regression analysis. Our results show that firms in counties with (...) strong religious social norms are less likely to engage in earnings management. Furthermore, we attempt to mitigate endogeneity concerns by employing a modified Difference-Differences model and Propensity score matching methods. We find that the negative effects of religion on earnings management still hold. Overall, these findings emphasize the empirical relevance of the association between the local social norms and earnings manipulations. (shrink)

The progress of social economy has created a better environment for the healthy development of young people, but the heavy schoolwork and life pressure have caused many students to ignore the scientific management of physical health. At this stage, people need a scientific physical health service system to help students understand their own health data, propose targeted exercise methods and health knowledge, and actively encourage and guide students to participate in physical exercise. The purpose of this article is to cultivate (...) students’ good self-exercise awareness and improve their physical fitness and health. To this end, this article has designed a smart health service system for young people. This article introduces the various service functions in the health management service system and explains in detail the entry, induction, and analysis of student physical health data in the system. The essence of the health intelligent service system is to provide students with targeted healthy exercise strategies through data analysis. This paper studies the health intervention plan of the health intelligent service system. From the experimental data, the improved particle swarm algorithm in this paper increases the effectiveness of the system in adolescent health data mining from 80.5% to 92.19%, which undoubtedly optimizes the system. It helps a lot. (shrink)