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Articles from open access and local journals are important resources for research in Korea and the usage trends of these articles are important indicators for the assessment of the current research practice. We analyzed an institutional collection of published papers from 1998 to 2014 authored by researchers from Seoul National University, and their references from papers published between 1998 and 2011. The published papers were collected from Web of Science or Scopus and were analyzed according to the proportion of articles from open access journals. Their cited references from published papers in Web of Science were analyzed according to the proportion of local (South Korean) or open access journals. The proportion of open access papers was relatively stable until 2006 (2.5 ~ 5.2% in Web of Science and 2.7 ~ 4.2% in Scopus), but then increased to 15.9% (Web of Science) or 18.5% (Scopus) in 2014. We analyzed 2,750,485 cited references from 52,295 published papers. We found that the overall proportion of cited articles from local journals was 1.8% and that for open access journals was 3.0%. Citations of open access articles have increased since 2006 to 4.1% in 2011, although the increase in open access article citations was less than for open access publications. The proportion of citations from local journals was even lower. We think that the publishing / citing mismatch is a term to describe this difference, which is an issue at Seoul National University, where the number of published papers at open access or local journals is increasing but the number of citations is not. The cause of this discrepancy is multi-factorial but the governmental / institutional policies, social / cultural issues and authors' citing behaviors will explain the mismatch. However, additional measures are also necessary, such as the development of an institutional citation database and improved search capabilities with respect to local and open access documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This study aimed to determine whether self-regulation acts as a mediating factor in the relationship between obesity-related stress and weight control behavior, targeting Korean female college students. Obesity-related stress and weight control behaviors are important factors affecting an individual's health and well-being, and self-control, a psychological trait, can play a pivotal role in regulating how individuals respond to stress and engage in weight management behaviors. Methods: This study employed a descriptive correlational design. A total of 109 female college students with overweight and obesity participated in the study. We used a self-report questionnaire to measure obesity-related stress, self-control, and degree of weight control behavior. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation coefficient analysis, and bootstrapping using Hayes' PROCESS macro for mediation. Results: Significant relationships between obesity-related stress and weight control behavior (r = 0.25, p < 0.001), obesity-related stress and self-control (r = −0.36, p < 0.001), and weight control behavior and self-control (r = 0.26, p < 0.001) were observed. Self-control showed an indirect mediating effect on the relationship between obesity-related stress and weight control behavior (Β = 0.37, p = 0.001). Conclusions: Through the research results, it was confirmed that self-control is a factor that has a mediating effect in the relationship between obesity-related stress and weight control behavior among female college students with overweight and obesity. These results underscore the importance of addressing self-control strategies in interventions aimed at promoting healthy weight management among female college students with overweight or obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous studies have suggested that frequent toothbrushing is associated with a lower risk of future cardiovascular events. We sought to investigate further the relationship between toothbrushing, cardiovascular risk factors, and lifestyle behaviours. Methods: We analysed a cross-sectional survey including 13,761 adults aged 30 years or older without a history of cardiovascular diseases from the Korean National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey. Conventional cardiovascular risk factors (blood pressure, lipid profiles, and fasting glucose), and inflammatory markers (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein [hsCRP], and white blood cell counts [WBC]) were investigated in relation to the frequency of toothbrushing. Results: The estimated 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk, calculated using the pooled cohort equations was 13.7%, 9.1%, and 7.3% for participants who reported toothbrushing 0–1, 2, and ≥ 3 times a day, respectively. Both conventional risk factors and inflammatory markers were significantly associated with frequent toothbrushing. However, after adjusting potential confounding factors such as age, sex, comorbidities, and lifestyle behaviours, only inflammatory markers were remained as significant factors. Conclusions: Oral hygiene behaviours are closely linked to cardiovascular risk factors. This study suggests that reduced systemic inflammatory burden may explain the benefit of improved oral hygiene in terms of cardiovascular risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customer perception is considered to have an integral influence upon restaurant selection as it is highly important to analyze the preferences of the customers. On the other hand, the Korean food is being accepted in different nations across the world because the younger generations tend to follow the pop culture of Korea which is a powerhouse of Korean media. The Korean restaurants are found to be gaining highly competitive advantage in Malaysia over the other ethnic restaurants. This is due to the customer positive perception regarding the Korean food and its culture. In this research, the focus is upon the identification of the influence of customer perception of selecting a Korean Restaurant in Malaysia. The research is conducted under the view of other scholars and their research as well as published studies. The theory of planned behavior is analyzed in this research along with assessing the customer perception and its influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to provide novel insight into cognitive and emotional factors contributing to green customer citizenship behaviours, as mediated by green attitudes in general and moderated by culture. Design/methodology/approach: The investigation was guided by the "value attitude behaviour hierarchy" and green customer emotions, which served as a framework for understanding the mediating effect of attitude on the relationships between cognitive and emotional factors (green consumption values and emotional affinity towards nature) and customer citizenship advocacy and feedback behaviours. Data was obtained from respondents in the USA and South Korea. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, bootstrapping and Wald tests were performed to conclude on the model and verify the moderating effect of culture on the indirect effects established. Findings: In both countries, green consumption values and emotional affinity towards nature positively influence green attitudes and stimulate feedback behaviour. Green attitudes only predict advocacy in the USA. Culture moderates the majority of the indirect effects examined. Research limitations/implications: The model presents a novel approach to stimulate green advocacy and feedback behaviours and may aid firms in closing the "green gap" and co-create value with customers. Firms could profit from customers advocating the benefits of green purchasing to other customers and providing feedback on interventions required that will convince reluctant customers to make a purchase. Originality/value: This study offers a multicultural perspective on the connection between a novel set of cognitive and emotional factors and green customer citizenship advocacy and feedback behaviours that may directly and indirectly influence green purchasing, value co-creation and closing of the "green gap". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study explores the effect of cultural intelligence (CQ) on migrant workers' innovative behavior, as well as the mediating role of knowledge sharing on the CQ-innovative behavior relationship. Besides, it also examines the extent to which the mediating process is moderated by climate for inclusion. Using survey data collected from Chinese migrant workers and their supervisors working in South Korea (n = 386), migrant workers' CQ is found to positively impact their innovative behavior through enhanced knowledge sharing. However, it is observed that this indirect relationship is significant, only for migrant workers in a strong climate for inclusion. Thus, these findings reveal the underlying mediation and moderation mechanism and consequently unveil the important role of migrant workers' CQ in shaping their behavior. This study provides insightful and practical implications to a multicultural organization, where culturally diverse migrant workers work together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the mechanisms that influence team-level performance. It investigates psychological safety, a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking and a causal model mediated by learning behavior and efficacy. This model hypothesizes that psychological safety and efficacy are related, which have been believed to be same-dimension constructs. It also explains the process of how learning behavior affects the team's efficacy. In a study of 104 field sales and service teams in South Korea, psychological safety did not directly affect team effectiveness. However, when mediated by learning behavior and efficacy, a full-mediation effect was found. The results show (i) that psychological safety is the engine of performance, not the fuel, and (ii) how individuals contribute to group performance under a psychologically safe climate, enhancing team processes. Based on the findings, this article suggests theoretical and methodological implications for future research to maximize teams' effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution is closely associated with the development of respiratory illness. Behavioral adaptations of people to air pollution may influence its impact, yet this has not been investigated in the literature. Our hypothesis is that people experience and learn the underlying air quality to decide their adaptation, and they have a stronger incentive to behaviorally adapt to the air quality as it deteriorates. We tested our hypothesis on a sample of approximately 25,700 individuals from South Korea from 2002 to 2013 that contained information on daily doctor’s visits due to respiratory disease. We matched individuals to the mean of the past seven-day concentration of the particulate matter of size between 2.5 and 10 micrometers (PM10) in their county of residence. We examined whether people living in counties with greater air pollution suffer less from respiratory disease when the concentration increases. For the analysis, we separated counties into quintiles based on their mean seven-day PM10, and regressed the binary indicator of a daily doctor’s visit with a resulting diagnosis of respiratory disease on the seven-day PM10 concentration of the county of residence interacted with the quintile dummies. The key findings are that a 1-standard-deviation increase in the seven-day PM10 concentration in the two lowest quintiles is associated with an increase of 0.054 percentage points in the likelihood of a doctor’s visit with a resulting diagnosis of respiratory disease, which is about 40% larger than the effect in higher quintiles, and the size of 1-standard-deviation gradually increases from 0.037 percentage points in the third quintile to 0.040 percentage points in the fifth quintile. The smaller increase in the likelihood of respiratory disease in more polluted locations can be explained by the behavioral adaptation to the environment, but the effectiveness of the adaptation seems limited among the highly polluted locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to prevent ship collisions, it is important to understand the behavior of navigators that leads to these collisions. The main cause of marine accidents in the Republic of Korea is attributed to navigator error, particularly in collisions. Hence, reducing navigator error is a key issue that needs to be addressed to prevent accidents. However, the lack of objective measure to quantify navigator error remains a challenge. The purpose of this study is to develop an objective identification of a navigator's behavior in a collision encountering situation. Two behavior models for the success and failure of collision avoidance are developed by collecting participants' actions, using a ship maneuvering simulator within a given scenario. These maneuvering behavior models are validated in terms of their discrimination powers. The results show that maneuvering behavior is clearly identified in the data processing and model development phases. The proposed behavior models are expected to provide a better understanding of how navigators behave to help reduce collision accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effect of implementing the act of prohibition on sex trafficking (PST) on sexually transmitted disease (STD) infections among South Korean female sex workers (FSWs) working at prostitution blocks. Research data were collected twice through the Korean government-sanctioned survey for female sex workers (1st wave = 1,083; 2nd wave = 926). We examined the associations among health behavior, working conditions, and the effect of PST act via hierarchical logistic regression analyses using propensity score matching. After adjusted covariates, the risk probability was 0.288 times lower among FSWs who had remained in prostitute blocks after the PST act enforcement compared to FSWs who had worked before the PST. Similarly, the risk probability for a gonorrhea infection was 0.219 times lower among FSWs who had remained in prostitute blocks after the PST act compared to FSWs who had worked before the PST. Therefore, this study showed that, besides already known factors, the implementation and establishment of the PST Act was a strong factor that suppressed STD infections among FSWs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Few studies have examined the relationship between patient safety climate and two forms of patient safety behavior (i.e., safety compliance and safety participation) among nurses. Better understanding of factors contributing to nurses' safety behaviors could enhance patient safety. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the effect of patient safety climate on nurses' patient safety behavior and to explore whether patient safety knowledge and motivation mediate this relationship. Methods: This correlational, cross-sectional study used survey data from 1,053 staff nurses working at a general hospital located in a metropolitan area of South Korea. Structural equation modeling was employed to test a hypothesized multiple mediation model that was guided by Griffin and Neal's model of safety performance. Results: The results indicated that patient safety climate was directly related to both patient safety compliance behavior (β = 0.27, p < 0.001) and patient safety participation behavior (β = 0.25, p < 0.001). Concerning indirect effects, patient safety climate was associated with patient safety compliance behavior through both patient safety knowledge (β = 0.26, p < 0.001) and patient safety motivation (β = 0.04, p = 0.038), whereas patient safety climate was related to patient safety participation behavior only through patient safety knowledge (β = 0.27, p < 0.001) and not through patient safety motivation (β = 0.00, p = 0.985). Conclusion: Based on this study's findings, building an organizational climate focused on patient safety is vital for improving nurses' patient safety behavior. Improving an organization's patient safety climate could promote both safety knowledge and motivation in nurses and thereby potentially enhance their patient safety behavior. Hence, healthcare organizations should implement practical interventions to improve their patient safety climate. Also, nursing management interventions designed to transfer patient safety knowledge to nurses would be particularly effective in improving their safety behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose AI nurturing or complementing human intelligence is becoming more important than ever. The goal of the Cognitive Behavioral Assistive Technology (CBAT), advocated by the author since 2017, is to develop technology assisting cognition and behavior of human with and without disabilities. For the first step, we focus on technology which promotes cognitive health for preventing cognitive decline and dementia among older adults by social activities, since a systematic review found that social activity intervention may help maintain cognitive function among healthy older adults (Kelly et al., 2017), there are no global recommendations for social activity interventions related to cognitive health because evidence of the impact of such intervention is limited (World Health Organization, 2019). One major reason was the lack of technology for generating quantitatively and qualitatively consistent social activities necessary for cognitive intervention. Method In order to realize cognitive intervention via social activities, we develop novel technologies which promote intensive conversations among older adults, and demonstrate their effects on older adults' cognitive and brain functions. We also develop technologies to predict cognitive functions from different modalities of behavioral and/or physiological data, aiming to monitor cognitive functions in everyday life. Results and Discussion The five main results were obtained as follows: 1) Photo-Integrated Conversation Moderated by Robots (PICMOR), a group conversation intervention program and its supporting systems, was developed to build resilience against cognitive decline and dementia. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) of PICMOR demonstrated for the first time the positive effects of a robotic social activity intervention on cognitive function in healthy older adults (Otake-Matsuura et al. 2021). 2) A voxel-based morphometric analysis was applied to the structural MRI data. In the analysis, the regional brain volume was compared between the intervention group and the control group. Candidate brain regions were identified successfully that reflect the beneficial effect of conversation-based interventions on cognitive function (Sugimoto and Otake-Matsuura 2022). 3) We recorded large-scale data of one million words from group conversations among healthy elderly people through an RCT and analyzed the relationship between spoken language and cognitive functions in terms of scaling laws, namely, Heaps' law (Abe and Otake-Matsuura 2020). The results suggest that we can predict the cognitive function of the speaker through analyzing transcribed conversation data. 4) A Dialogue-Based System with Photo and Storytelling for Older Adults (DBS-PS), a dialogue-based robot system, was developed for cognitive training at home (Tokunaga et al. 2021). The system was successfully utilized by older adults during the pandemic. 5) Behavioral responses were analyzed in a facial emotion implicit-short-term-memory learning and evaluation experiment. Various shallow and deep learning machine learning models were applied, resulting in median accuracies just under a 90% benchmark for automatic discrimination of normal cognition versus a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (Rutkowski et al. 2020). The results show that the application of machine learning (ML) to data collected through simple behavioral examination is effective for MCI and dementia onset diagnostics. The developed technologies are exemplars of CBAT as AI for super aged society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Little is known about health outcomes related to electronic cigarette (EC) use, despite its growing popularity. The aim of this study is to investigate the association between EC use and asthma. Methods: The study design is a cross-sectional study. A total of 35,904 high school students were included as the final study population. The presence of asthma was based on a student’s self-reported doctor diagnosis of asthma in the past 12 months. Results: Prevalence rates of asthmatics in ‘current EC users’ (n = 2,513), ‘former EC users’ (n = 2,078), and ‘never EC users’ (n = 31,313), were 3.9% (n = 98), 2.2% (n = 46) and 1.7% (n = 530), respectively. Comparing ‘current EC’ users with ‘never EC’ users, the unadjusted OR for asthma was 2.36 (95% CI: 1.89–2.94). In order to control for the effect of conventional cigarette (CC) smoking, after stratifying the subjects by the three CC smoking categories (never CC, former CC, and current CC), within the ‘never CC’ category, the unadjusted OR for asthma for ‘current EC’ users was 3.41 (95% CI: 1.79–6.49), and the adjusted OR was 2.74 (95% CI: 1.30–5.78). Severe asthma was reflected by the number of days absent from school due to asthma symptoms; current EC users had the highest adjusted OR for severe asthma compared to ‘never EC’ users. Conclusions: When compared to a reference population of high school students in South Korea, EC users have an increased association with asthma and are more likely to have had days absent from school due to severe asthma symptoms. In conclusion, the results indicate that EC use may be a risk factor for asthma. The results may be useful in developing a scientific basis for the evaluation of a potential health hazard by EC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide is not only an individual phenomenon, but it is also influenced by social and environmental factors. With the high suicide rate and the abundance of social media data in South Korea, we have studied the potential of this new medium for predicting completed suicide at the population level. We tested two social media variables (suicide-related and dysphoria-related weblog entries) along with classical social, economic and meteorological variables as predictors of suicide over 3 years (2008 through 2010). Both social media variables were powerfully associated with suicide frequency. The suicide variable displayed high variability and was reactive to celebrity suicide events, while the dysphoria variable showed longer secular trends, with lower variability. We interpret these as reflections of social affect and social mood, respectively. In the final multivariate model, the two social media variables, especially the dysphoria variable, displaced two classical economic predictors – consumer price index and unemployment rate. The prediction model developed with the 2-year training data set (2008 through 2009) was validated in the data for 2010 and was robust in a sensitivity analysis controlling for celebrity suicide effects. These results indicate that social media data may be of value in national suicide forecasting and prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTRevisiting the nexus of identities and norms, this article argues that actors? attitude and policies are not the automatic reflection of a salient identity but the articulation of what I call ?identity norms?, defined as standards of appropriate behaviour for in-group actors vis-?-visan out-group. Central to my argument is that identities become straw men at times of momentous change, whilst identity norms, crafted and propagated through an intersubjective understanding amongst different actors, emerge as a guiding principle in state-to-state relations. By illustrating the trajectories of reconciliation between North and South Korea, this article examines the anomalies of how antagonistic states forge friendly ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]