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Worldwide, the population is aging rapidly. One in two children born after the year 2000 is expected to live up to his or her 100th birthday. Hong Kong is no exception. While the number of older adults aged 65 or above has been expected to rise from 1.16 million in 2016 to 2.59 million in 2066 (2.2 times), the number of adults aged 80 or above has been expected to increase from 340,300 in 2016 to 1.21 million in 2066 (3.5 times). The growth of centenarians could be even more – from about 2,800 in 2014 to 46,800 in 2064 (16.7 times). Enabling the oldest members of our society to live a dignified, autonomous and satisfying life – despite their age – is the key goal for initiatives and policies that support successful aging for all. Survival to age 80 is qualitatively different from survival from 80 to 100 years or older. The latter group tends to face more physical frailty, more difficult recovery from diseases, the departure of their spouse and even of their adult children, and their own imminent death. Despite these often-unresolvable ontological situations, our previous study – The 2011 Hong Kong Centenarian Study – revealed a group of near-centenarians and centenarians (NCCs; aged 95 or over) who lived a dignified, autonomous and satisfying life. While our previous study was the first in the territory to survey the physical and psychosocial well-being of NCCs, this study will investigate how these extremely old individuals cope with their multidimensional challenges using a century’s worth of coping resources and strategies. This study conceptualises the coping process of NCCs as managing the loss and gains of limited personal and social resources. To cope with an adversity, older adults have to deploy personal and social resources to various reactive and proactive, cognitive and behavioural coping strategies. Successful resolution restores well-being and may lead to growth in resources. Families of these older adults are situated in the current era where aged-old wisdom constantly meets with new technologies under the changing normative family structure. In exploring the coping process, this study will investigate the impacts of indigenous wisdom, family caregiving and use of technology on the quality of life of the older adults and their families. Our findings will enable policymakers and care professionals to devise responsive strategies to facilitate aging-in-place for older adults and support to families with adults of advanced age as well as prepare the younger cohorts for aging successfully into their last decade of life. This study employs a convergent parallel mixed-method design. Cognitively sound Hong Kong Chinese older adults who have had their 95th birthday will be recruited together with their primary family caregivers. The Hong Kong Council of Social Service will support the recruitment of participants through their networks of elderly and rehabilitation services. Quantitative data, including physical health, psychological well-being, social support, spirituality, personality, coping strategies, lifestyles, health and social care utilisation, use of technology, caregiving experience and demographic characteristics, will be collected through a structured survey. Accounts of participants coping with adversities will be assessed using a life-story interview approach. Both quantitative and qualitative data will be collected through face-to-face interviews. Each data collection session will last for about 2.5 to 3 hours, with both the caregiver and the older adult participating. While the quantitative data will facilitate comparisons across participants and with international centenarian studies, qualitative data will provide rich contextual information about participants’ struggles and coping processes. The use of the mixed-method approach balances the depth and breadth of the information collected. The estimated sample size is 150 dyads. The project will take 36 months. As the third generation of centenarian studies begins to blossom worldwide, a centenarian study of Hong Kong Chinese older adults that is based on a clear conceptual framework with emphasis on the contribution of indigenous wisdom and gerontechnology, that capitalises on the strengths of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and that engages the voices of family caregivers is urgently needed to inform the next era of policies that will suit the needs of families with adults of advanced age.

Since its origin in the early 1900s, the discipline of play therapy has gained meaningful visibility in Western countries, but is still less recognized by professionals and the public in Hong Kong, compared to other approaches that support child mental health, despite a growing body of evidence for its effectiveness for child development and treatment. Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT) is the most influential manualized play therapy approach. To date, five meta-analytic studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of CCPT interventions, one of which also included a systematic review. Ray et al. (2015) conducted a meta-analysis and systematic review of 23 randomized control trials (RCTs) conducted in school settings, finding that play therapy produced statistically significant outcomes for children with disruptive behavior, internalizing, self-efficacy, and academic problems. Lin and Bratton (2015) conducted a meta-analytic review of 24 RCTs of child-centered play therapy, and found it to be effective for externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, caregiver-child relationship stress, and self-efficacy. A search of the Play Therapy Outcome Research Database shows a further 12 RCT studies conducted since 2015, although these have not been reviewed for rigor or consistent methodology here. Child-centered play therapy has been designated as a promising evidence-based mental health intervention by the Results First Clearinghouse (NREPP) and the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC). Though promising, there is still a gap in the evidence base compared to more established approaches such as behavioral intervention. This gap is highlighted by emerging trends in play therapy practice. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the social, cognitive, and physical development of a cohort of young children has become a focus of research attention. Together with this, the growth of online intervention and teleplay during the pandemic, in the context of broader digitalization opportunities for play-based intervention – such as virtual reality – are highlighted. A key question for practitioners and researchers in Hong Kong, is the application of this approach in the contemporary local context. While there is evidence showing the effectiveness of these approaches in Western populations, the applicability of these approaches has yet to be meaningfully studied locally. Although the cultural background of Hong Kong is diverse, the predominant culture is Chinese, and it is believed that Chinese family dynamics differ from those of Western families. This highlights the need to develop a locally relevant approach in Hong Kong, which can only benefit from dialogue between local practitioners and researchers, with prominent international figures in the field. The proposed project will involve a conference that is aimed at practitioners, researchers, and students in the field of play therapy, that will also be open to the public. Prominent international scholars or practitioners in play therapy will be invited. The conference will aim to meet several related goals. An education day (or rather half-day) will introduce key play therapy approaches (international and local) to audience members who would like to learn from well regarded figures within those fields. The first day of the conference will present the current state of the field and trends in play therapy, which will include teleplay and digitalization, and work with relevant populations. The second day will highlight research methodology in play therapy research and questions related to culture and the local and regional context, including work with parents and families. An informal meeting on the fourth day aims to consolidate growing collaboration and exchange. The impact of the proposed project goes beyond enhancing the skills of practitioners. It also aims at establishing a network of people interested in developing play therapy in the local community. The team will maintain a mailing list of this group to facilitate future communication. The dialogue between the international experts and the local parties will provide a base for future development. The conference proceedings will be published in an e-format, together with videos of the keynote speeches on the project’s webpage which will have use as future training materials, while the collected data will be potentially useful in future research.

Many studies of categorical emotion perception rely on morphing to generate stimuli. The basic function of morphing is to create a number of transitional faces of the same person that morph from one particular emotional expression to another, thereby providing a continuum of emotions. The rationale for choosing which two particular expressions to morph, however, is rarely mentioned. In the dimensional account of emotion, emotion identification depends on which emotional expressions are compared. Such an account therefore requires multiple morphing combinations rather than an exclusive morphing pattern to capture the relativity of emotion identification. The dimensional account further predicts that the categorical feature between two emotional expressions is less obvious when they are located in the same quarter of a 2 (pleasantness) x 2 (activation) dimensional space. The relative strength of these two dimensions may also differ. There is little empirical work verifying the role of the dimensional account of emotion, a gap the proposed research will fill in a three-phase study. In the first phase, a new photobank of emotional faces with all combinations of morphing sequences will be built. To enhance ecological validity, it will contain both exaggerated version of the expressions found in traditional photobanks and their natural version. In the second phase, the categorical features of the traditional morphing sequence and other morphing sequences will be compared. If the dimensional account of emotion is correct, the time taken to identify the emotional expressions should be longer if the expressions are morphed based on two basic emotions that are located in the same quarter rather than in different quarters. The final phase will involve a comparison of dimensional strength. The emotional expressions within a pair that differs exclusively in the pleasantness dimension are expected to be more discriminable than those within a pair that differs in the activation dimension. The results obtained in the second and third phases will allow verification of the thesis that discriminability is a relative concept determined by the dimensional nature of basic emotions.

Prior research has documented that controlling shareholders may expropriate wealth through tunneling-like connected transactions. This project explores how firms with forthcoming transfer of assets to related parties justify the transaction price prior to the tunneling transactions without attracting investors' attention or regulatory intervention, and how firms respond to the economic consequences of these trading strategies. Specifically, the questions of interest are whether suspected tunneled firms use asset impairment before asset-transfer connected transactions to reduce the transaction price, and as a consequence, whether these firms manage contemporaneous earnings to avoid decreases in reported earnings? Our analyses will provide insight into the policy implications of the mandatory disclosure of connected parties (related parties) and connected transactions (related party transactions).

This research explores the circumstances under which people from ethnic minorities can succeed from ethnic minorities can succeed in Hong Kong, and identifies appropriate interventions for those in disadvantaged situations.

The present research project investigates the introduction of film in Shanghai and its impact on city governance in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The arrival of cinema as a major pastime in the early twentieth century fascinated a wide spectrum of urban residents and thereby created a new type of crowd—filmgoers—despite the audiences’ diverse racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds. The blending of people of differing social standings in newly constructed movie theaters posed a challenge to the local authorities in Shanghai, who were impelled to respond to the rise of film—the most cutting-edge technology and a novel form of entertainment. In consequence, Shanghai’s colonial authorities—the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) and Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP)— enacted new architectural codes and fire prevention rules, tightened up anti-crime and anti-prostitution measures, and, finally, established a censorial system to make films containing obscene and subversive elements inaccessible to the viewing public.

While the existing scholarship on films and film exhibitions in early-twentieth-century China focuses mainly on how the motion picture managed to make inroads into the city dwellers’ everyday life, lent experiences of modernity, and elicited modern sensibilities, scholars have paid scant attention to cinema’s role in reshaping a city. Likewise, students of urban history in modern China usually view the popularization of the motion picture as mere evidence of the triumph of modernism and cosmopolitanism but fall short of understanding it as a key player that refashioned the physical, administrative, legal/political, and cultural aspects of Chinese cities. Thus, this proposed study is inherently interdisciplinary as it stitches together two formerly disparate academic traditions—film and urban studies—to explore the dyadic relationship between cinema and city in the early decades of the twentieth century.

By exploring the legislative and reform efforts made by the local authorities in Shanghai in response to the dominance of the motion picture in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the present research project attempts to demonstrate how cinema and city were mutually constitutive: On the other hand, the prevalence of cinemagoing as a new pastime prompted the political authorities in Shanghai to reformulate their agendas of city administration by devising new urban plans, maintaining public safety, diminishing racial segregation, resolving racial/national conflicts, and achieving political stability. On the other hand, moral anxiety and political expediency caused by pervasive fears for the display of scenes of crimes and revolutions on the silver screen cultivated a preference for movies about family, romantic love, and the destinies of individuals that masked intense racial, national, and class clashes in the external world, resulting in the market success of melodramatic films, particularly those of D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), throughout the 1920s.