Research News

With the growing demand for long-term care worldwide, integrated care facilities have become a necessity for many patients with chronic conditions. Global health scientist Shenglan Tang and team reviewed 87 integrated care programs for chronic diseases in electronic databases in six Asian countries, including China, India, and Singapore, and found that financial incentives have played a crucial role in facilitating integrated care and ensuring the sustainability of programs.  In many cases, the performance of programs was found not to have been adequately assessed.

In Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century, diverse trends in international thought and the awakening of national consciousness catalyzed various political movements in the context of colonialism. Particularly notable among them was the development of local organizations by the Nanyang and Malayan communist parties. Reviewing Anna Belogurova's book, "The Nanyang Revolution: The Comintern and Chinese Networks in Southeast Asia, 1890-1957," historian Qian Zhu considers it a valuable presentation of the transnational history of the Malayan Communist Party movement against the backdrop of anti-imperialism and nation-state development. "By exploring the role played by Chinese and overseas Chinese nationalists in the transnational anti-colonial movements of the early 20th century, this book is a unique attempt to move away from the narrative of orthodox historiography focusing on nation-state and party politics,” she says.

Whether on screen or in the newspapers, single men are often portrayed as terrorists and rebels, involved in the overwhelming majority of political violence. While this perception may hold true in individual cases, it is not statistically significant. In an article published by International Studies Quarterly, political scientist Tyler Kustra finds that, while the proportion of young men in a country has a statistically significant impact on the level of political violence there, whether or not these men are married has no additional effect. If participating in political violence caused young men to be single, this would have a negligible impact on a country's proportion of single young men, thereby explaining why marital status is uncorrelated with political violence at the national level. It would also explain why the individual-level evidence shows that most terrorists and guerillas are single.

Recognizing others’ emotions from facial expressions is a necessary skill for adults. However, pain is less visible to observers than core emotions. Psychologist Shan Wang and her team investigated the mechanisms underpinning the recognition of pain expressions, in terms of spatial frequency (SF) information analysis and compared pain with two core emotions (fear and happiness). They found a temporal advantage of low-SF over high-SF information for expression recognition, including pain, and the recognition of pain was found to be slower and more difficult than core emotions.