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Background Monitoring the microcirculation in human feet is crucial in assessing peripheral vascular diseases, such as diabetic foot. However, conventional imaging modalities are more focused on diagnosis in major arteries, and there are limited methods to provide microvascular information in early stages of the disease. Purpose To investigate a three-dimensional (3D) noncontrast bimodal photoacoustic (PA)/US imaging system that visualizes the human foot morphologically and also reliably quantifies podiatric vascular parameters noninvasively. Materials and Methods A clinically relevant PA/US imaging system was combined with a foot scanner to obtain 3D PA and US images of the human foot in vivo. Healthy participants were recruited from September 2020 to June 2021. The collected 3D PA and US images were postprocessed to present structural information about the foot. The quantitative reliability was evaluated in five repeated scans of 10 healthy feet by calculating the intraclass correlation coefficient and minimal detectable change, and the detectability of microvascular changes was tested by imaging 10 healthy feet intentionally occluded with use of a pressure cuff (160 mm Hg). Statistically significant difference is indicated with

Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) embedded with a 532 nm pulse laser is widely used to visualize the microvascular structures in both small animals and humans in vivo. An opto-ultrasound combiner (OUC) is often utilized in high-speed PAM to confocally align the optical and acoustic beams to improve the system's sensitivity. However, acoustic impedance mismatch in the OUC results in little improvement in the sensitivity. Alternatively, a ring-shaped ultrasound transducer (RUT) can also accomplish the confocal configuration. Here, we compare the performance of OUC and RUT modules through ultrasound pulse-echo tests and PA imaging experiments. The signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the RUT-based system were 15 dB, 12 dB, and 7 dB higher when compared to the OUC-based system for ultrasound pulse-echo test, PA phantom imaging test, and PA in-vivo imaging test, respectively. In addition, the RUT-based system could image the microvascular structures of small parts of a mouse body in a few seconds with minimal loss in SNR. Thus, with increased sensitivity, improved image details, and fast image acquisition, we believe the RUT-based systems could play a significant role in the design of future fast-PAM systems.

Grounded in self-regulatory resources and conservation of resources theories, the current research examines poor self-regulatory capacity as a precursor to microbreaks and their possible outcomes at work. Full-time employees completed multiple online surveys for 10 (n₁ = 779 daily observations) and 5 workdays (n₂ = 1,024 daily observations). In Study 1, multilevel path analysis results showed that on days when employees had poorer recovery at home (i.e., poor sleep quality), they experienced higher fatigue in the next morning (low self-regulatory capacity) and thus took microbreaks more frequently at work. In turn, their engagement in microbreaks was related to higher work engagement during the day and lower end-of-work fatigue. Furthermore, perceived health climate was found to moderate the path from morning fatigue to microbreaks. In Study 2, we replicated and confirmed the serial mediation paths found in Study 1 (poor sleep quality → morning fatigue → microbreaks → work engagement and end-of-work fatigue). Building on Study 1, Study 2 also identified microbreak autonomy as a mechanism by which perceived health climate moderates the path between morning fatigue and microbreaks (i.e., mediated moderation effect). Exploratory analyses discovered intriguing patterns of socialization microbreaks versus other microbreaks, providing further implications for the theoretical perspective. Overall, the findings support the theoretical resource perspective of microbreaks as an effective energy management strategy while at work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the influence of supervisor incivility on employees’ general self-efficacy and engagement and their mediating roles in a relationship between supervisor incivility and employees’ service delivery. The study also explores how gender (dis)similarities between supervisors and subordinates affect these relationships.Design/methodology/approachA total of 276 frontline hotel employees in the US Midwest participated in the study. The research model was examined through a two-step structural equation modeling.FindingsThe study findings suggest that an uncivil supervisor negatively influences hotel employees’ self-efficacy and engagement level, which served as underlying mechanisms connecting supervisor incivility with reduced service delivery. The findings did not support the moderating role of gender (dis)similarity.Practical implicationsThe results of the current study should urge organizations to acknowledge the detrimental impact of workplace incivility and to commit to the prevention and termination of employee mistreatment. Organizations make efforts to ensure that supervisors serve their internal customers with support and gratitude and help enhance employees’ psychological resources.Originality/valueThe current study advanced the body of literature by suggesting an integral psychological underlying mechanism linking uncivil treatment and declined performance in the hospitality industry.

An emerging body of research has investigated the relationship between helping (as a type of organizational citizenship behaviour) and emotional exhaustion (as an aspect of employee health). Research has demonstrated a significant relationship between helping and emotional exhaustion, but the theoretical arguments for the causal direction vary across studies. Specifically, some researchers have conceptualized helping as an outcome of emotional exhaustion, while others have regarded helping as a predictor of emotional exhaustion. This lack of theoretical clarity in directionality hinders the field's ability to summarize existing empirical findings cohesively and elucidate theoretical mechanisms. Therefore, this study attempts to clarify the theoretical directionality between helping and emotional exhaustion using four waves of data collected at 6-month intervals. Autoregressive cross-lagged analyses with auto-correlations revealed that more helping was associated with less future emotional exhaustion from Wave 1 to Wave 2, but from Wave 2 to Wave 3, the directionality reversed, as less emotional exhaustion significantly predicted more future helping, and from Wave 3 to Wave 4, both prediction directions were no longer significant. The findings suggest that helping and emotional exhaustion reciprocally affect each other, though the reciprocal pattern may disappear across time. The present study sheds light on the theoretical relationship between helping and emotional exhaustion, and provides theoretical and practical implications.

Growing concerns about intensive information and communication technology (ICT) use led to abundant research on its debilitating effects on employees' abilities to meet family demands. Drawing on the stressor-strain model, we conducted a daily diary study to investigate how different types of daily ICT demands experienced during work hours and after work influence work-family conflict (WFC) in the evening. We collected data from 98 full-time employees (793 day-level observations) for 10 consecutive workdays to understand employees' work-nonwork interface experiences, namely, negative spillover and role conflict. First, we examined a multilevel mediation model to test the negative spillover effect of on-the-job ICT demands on WFC in the evening via negative affect (NA) at the end of the workday. Second, we investigated the effects of off-the-job ICT demands on WFC to provide evidence of role conflict in the nonwork domain. Further, we tested the protective role of boundary control in these phenomena. The multilevel analysis results revealed that different types of ICT demands experienced at work have idiosyncratic impacts on WFC. Also, while extended availability after work hours yields greater WFC, this link was weaker for the employees who perceive high boundary control.

Acoustic-resolution photoacoustic micro-scopy (AR-PAM) is an emerging biomedical imaging modality that combines superior optical sensitivity and fine ultrasonic resolution in an optical quasi-diffusive regime (~1–3 mm in tissues). AR-PAM has been explored for anatomical, functional, and molecular information in biological tissues. Heretofore, AR-PAM systems have suffered from a limited field-of-view (FOV) and/or slow imaging speed, which have precluded them from routine preclinical and clinical applications. Here, we demonstrate an advanced AR-PAM system that overcomes both limitations of previous AR-PAM systems. The new AR-PAM system demonstrates a super wide-field scanning that utilized a 1-axis water-proofing microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) scanner integrated with two linear stepper motor stages. We achieved an extended FOV of $36 \times 80$ mm2 by mosaicking multiple volumetric images of $36 \times 2.5$ mm2 with a total acquisition time of 224 seconds. For one volumetric data (i.e., $36 \times 2.5$ mm2), the B-scan imaging speed over the short axis (i.e., 2.5 mm) was 83 Hz in humans. The 3D volumetric image was also provided by using MEMS mirror scanning along the X-axis and stepper-motor scanning along the Y-axis. The super-wide FOV mosaic image was realized by registering and merging all individual volumetric images. Finally, we obtained multi-plane whole-body in-vivo PA images of small animals, illustrating distinct multi-layered structures including microvascular networks and internal organs. Importantly, we also visualized microvascular networks in human fingers, palm, and forearm successfully. This advanced MEMS-AR-PAM system could potentially enable hitherto not possible wide preclinical and clinical applications.

Beyond the prior investigations that took scale‐level approaches to determining discriminant validity in proactivity constructs, the current study contributes a much‐needed interrogation of the items used to measure the behaviors in this domain. The substantive validity (SV) assessments (Study 1) showed that many of the items were judged to be inconsistent with the definition of the construct they assess or, alternatively, more consistent with the definition of a different construct in the domain. Further, exploratory factor analysis revealed the difficulty in empirically separating the four behaviors, while BiM results also advocated against the unique variance of them after accounting for a general factor (Study 2). Altogether, our results show that the items are partly to blame for the empirical redundancy issue.

Leadership is a much-studied topic, and yet, the topic still attracts researchers. As an essential factor in every organization, however, leadership contributes significantly to a business failure, especially in small independent restaurant businesses and this could be due to the unique operations of the industry and the lack of leadership studies on small hospitality businesses. This study aims to fill the gap by exploring the ideal characteristics for small independent restaurant leaders to become an effective leader using a qualitative approach from their employees’ perspectives. Qualitative data were collected through four focus groups and one dyadic interview. The findings of the qualitative data analysis revealed nine themes: respectful, compassionate, effective communicator, experienced, effective delegator, gives recognition, sociable, emotionally controlled, organized. The paper discussed implications of the findings for small independent restaurant businesses and the hospitality industry in general as well as implications for theory.

With abundant health-related information, the modern workforce is advised to engage in health-promoting behaviors such as good sleep, physical activities, and a healthy diet to stay productive at work. However, no study has provided a theoretical framework or empirical evidence on the association between employees' unhealthy eating behavior and the quality of their performance. Drawing from the stress and coping literature, the current study proposes a moderated mediation model to investigate the day-specific roles of (un)healthy lifestyle in regard to personal well-being and performance at work. We used daily diary data collected from 97 full-time employees and employed an experience sampling method (ESM) to examine this within-person phenomenon for 2 weeks. Our multilevel path analysis reveals that employees' unhealthy eating behavior in the evening led to emotional strain (e.g., guilt) as well as physical strain (e.g., stomachache, diarrhea) on the next morning; the emotional and physical strains experienced in the morning served as key mediators resulting in decreased quality of performance (i.e., less helping and more withdrawal behaviors) in the afternoon. Furthermore, emotional stability was found to moderate the relationship between unhealthy eating behavior and morning strains, such that employees with higher emotional stability tended to experience less negative emotions and fewer physical symptoms. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, along with suggestions for future studies on health-related behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

We demonstrate an agent-free multi-structural peripheral angiography technique based on the volumetric photoacoustic (PA) and ultrasound (US) images. The volumetric images are obtained by stacking B-mode PA/US images along the elevational direction using a motorized scanner. Three structural features such as skin, bone, and vasculature are extracted from the volumetric US image and combined with the PA microvasculature image to provide a multi-structural vascular image of the foot. For quantitative PA imaging, we have tested the reliability of the PA images. The method can be used to provide a comprehensive anatomic and functional analysis of the extremity.

Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), an emerging biomedical imaging technology, has provided the label-free imaging of biomolecules with the aid of superior optical contrast in them. A pulsed laser with wavelength of 532 nm is widely used to visualize the microvascular structures of small animal or human in vivo. Employing a customized 1-axis high-speed scanning device and ring-shaped ultrasound transducer (RUT), we developed a high-speed PAM system which enables wide field-of-view (FOV) imaging with high sensitivity. The optical and ultrasonic beam can be automatically aligned without opto-ultrasound beam combiner (OUC) by transmitting the laser through the hole in the transducer. Especially the transducer used in our system was designed to have a long focal length and a large sensing area to achieve wide-field imaging with high sensitivity. To verify the high sensitivity of the developed system, we performed ultrasonic pulse-echo experiments on quartz and PA in vitro imaging on leaf skeletons. Compared to the conventional beam alignment method which adopts OUC, the enhancement of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was 15 dB and 12 dB in those experiments, respectively. In addition, the high-speed scanner was designed to scan up to 12 mm long at resonant frequency of 80 Hz and to cover the wide sensing area of the transducer. By utilizing these specifications, the microvascular structures in a whole mouse ear could be imaged within 30 seconds without any additional image registration. The developed system could be a practical imaging platform for future studies in microvasculatures such as hemodynamic changes, oxygen saturation, and metabolism.

Among clinical photoacoustic and ultrasound beamforming (BF) techniques, a nonlinear p-th root delay and sum (NL-p-DAS) exhibits better contrast and resolution than conventional delay-and-sum. However, despite its advantages, signal loss and grainy speckles often degrade image quality by signal deformation. Thus, we proposed a new nonlinear BF algorithm called nonlinear p-th root spectral magnitude scaling (NL-p-SMS), which scales the signal in the spectral domain instead of the temporal domain. As a result, we achieved the enhanced contrast, contrast noise ratio, spatial resolution, and less grainy texture without significant signal or feature loss in both in vivo photoacoustic and ultrasound images.

We have developed a software package called 3D PHOVIS (3D Photoacoustic Visualization Studio) to support 3D volume data visualization in academia. It was developed with MATLAB-based graphical user interface software that utilizes CPU and GPU parallel computing technology to provide a convenient real-time working environment. 3D PHOVIS includes five modules, which can help volume stitching, scanning distortion removing, depth encoded visualization, and volume rendering with 3D photoacoustic data. It also supports 3D movie generation. In this presentation, we will interpret the algorithms and principles used in software development, and demonstrate its function with several examples.

A recently introduced nonlinear p th root delay-and-sum ( NL- p -DAS ) beamforming (BF) technique for ultrasound (US) and photoacoustic (PA) imaging, achieving better spatial and contrast resolution compared to a conventional delay and sum (DAS) technique. While the method is advantageous for better resolution, it suffers from grainy speckles and dark areas in the image mainly due to the interference of non-sinusoidal functions. In this Letter, we introduce a modified NL- p -DAS technique called nonlinear p th root spectral magnitude scaling ( NL- p -SMS ), which performs the p th root on the spectral magnitude instead of the temporal amplitude. We evaluated the US and PA images of NL- p -SMS against those of NL- p -DAS by comparing the axial and lateral line profiles, contrasts, and contrast-to-noise ratios (CNRs) in both phantom and in vivo imaging studies with various p values. As a result, we found that the NL- p -SMS has better axial resolution and CNR than the NL- p -DAS , and reduces the grainy speckles and dark area artifacts. We believe that, with this enhanced performance, our proposed approach could be an advancement compared to the existing nonlinear BF algorithms.

This study examines the short-term recovery benefits of weekend physical activity on reduced negative affective state (NA) on Monday morning, using a weekly diary method from 70 employees across four weekends (repeated pre- and post-weekend measures). The first hypothesis tests the within-person relationship between weekend physical activity and post-weekend NA. The results of multilevel path analysis show that the main effect of weekend physical activity on reduced Monday NA is not significant. In addition, the study tests weekend recovery experiences (i.e., psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control) and sleep hours as possible moderators. The findings support the moderating effects of psychological detachment and sleep hours. Specifically, weekend physical activity is related to lower Monday NA only if workers achieve high psychological detachment from work during the weekend. If not, their weekend physical activity is associated with higher NA. Also, the benefit of weekend physical activity occurs only when workers sleep longer on the weekend nights. The findings suggest that physical activity has important boundary conditions-psychological detachment and sleep duration-that influence its recovery effects on NA. The complex relationship between exercise and recovery is discussed, along with the implications of the findings for future research.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the interaction effect of job demands (e.g. display rules; DRs) and personal resources (e.g. emotional intelligence; EI) on work engagement and whether this interaction effect varies between managers and non-managers. Design/methodology/approach This study has been conducted on 572 hotel employees (153 managers and 388 non-managers) in China, and multiple linear regression analyses have been used to analyze the data. Findings The results indicate that the direct impact of DRs on work engagement was significantly positive for both hotel managers and non-managers; DRs boosted the positive impact of EI on work engagement, but only among managers; and EI boosted the positive impact of DRs on work engagement, but only among managers with high EI. Originality/value Previous studies have primarily focused on the antecedents and outcomes of work engagement, but little is about the direct impact of job demands and the interaction effect of job demands and personal resources on work engagement. This is the first study investigating DRs and its interaction effect with EI on work engagement among hotel managers and non-managers, respectively.

Since social media has become a fundamental part of the daily activities of people, the purpose of this study was to explore social media use by focusing on job demands that may explain why employees perceive social media are vital for them at work. Further, this study seeks to understand how employees use social media at work to experience recovery. Questionnaires were collected from current frontline hospitality non-managerial and managerial employees in the United States. Structural equation modeling was employed to analyze data. Results of the study confirm that at-work break activities including social and non-media break activities can be a channel for employees to experience recovery and deal with job demands. Moreover, the results suggest that at-work break activities are an important mediator between job demands and recovery experiences. Social media break activities also moderated the mediation effect of non-social media break activities between job demands and recovery experiences.

Purpose The purpose of the study was to examine the moderating effect of self-efficacy and gender on work engagement. Design/methodology/approach The survey study was conducted on 149 restaurant employees, and multiple regression analyses were used to analyze the data. Findings Self-efficacy significantly moderated the impact of perceived organizational support on work engagement, but the moderating effect of self-efficacy was only significant for women with low self-efficacy. Self-efficacy did not moderate the impact of work engagement on intent to leave. Practical implications The results of the study provide suggestions for managing men and women with different levels of self-efficacy in the hospitality workplace. Originality/value The focus of previous studies on work engagement has primarily been on its antecedents and outcomes, but little is known about individual differences in the relationship between work engagement and its antecedents/outcomes. This is the first study investigating self-efficacy and gender as moderators of work engagement in the hospitality industry.

Introduction: Despite the rich tradition of research on predictors of workplace injury, most studies rely on cross-sectional, between-person designs. Furthermore, prior research has often overlooked the possibility that factors outside the work domain can influence the occurrence of actual injuries at work. To address these limitations, the current study examined the effects of work and family demands on the occurrence of workplace injury. Drawing on the intuition of the work-home resources model (W-HR), we investigated how within-person level changes in demands and resources from both domains influence work injuries over a 12-year period. Method: We used 12 years of longitudinal data (N = 7,820) to study the long-term within-person changes in work and family domains and to capture the event of low frequency incidence such as workplace injury. Specifically, we conducted multilevel analyses to study the links between within-person change in time and energy resources both in work and family domains and within-person change in the likelihood of experiencing a workplace injury. Results and conclusion: The findings showed that within-person changes in work hours, spousal work hours, income and number of children, were significantly associated with changes in the likelihood of experiencing a workplace injury. We conclude with a discussion of implications for theory and future research of workplace injuries. Practical application: The research provided useful insights on the intimate association between work and family domains in the context of safety management.

The aim of this study was to examine extrinsic and intrinsic motivations as the antecedents of work engagement and to empirically test the motivation crowding theory using hospitality employees. The findings showed that intrinsic motivation played an important role in improving employees’ work engagement. The study also found that there was no indication that employees’ intrinsic motivation diminished when extrinsic motivation entered. It is also suggested that employers need to understand that creating a comfortable workplace environment and making jobs more interesting and meaningful will increase employees’ intrinsic motivation, which will help employees to engage more at work. Motivational antecedents of work engagement have been rarely studied and no studies have been conducted to research impacts of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators on employees’ work engagement in the hospitality industry, particularly in small restaurant businesses. In addition, empirical studies on motivation crowding theory are needed due to the inconclusive results.

In the modern workplace, employees are increasingly faced with high work demands, long work hours, and intensive time pressure, all of which present challenges for employees’ use and management of ...

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging (or optoacoustic imaging) is a novel biomedical imaging method in biological and medical research. This modality performs morphological, functional, and molecular imaging with and without labels in both microscopic and deep tissue imaging domains. A variety of innovations have enhanced 3D PA imaging performance and thus has opened new opportunities in preclinical and clinical imaging. However, the 3D visualization tools for PA images remains a challenge. There are several commercially available software packages to visualize the generated 3D PA images. They are generally expensive, and their features are not optimized for 3D visualization of PA images. Here, we demonstrate a specialized 3D visualization software package, namely 3D Photoacoustic Visualization Studio (3D PHOVIS), specifically targeting photoacoustic data, image, and visualization processes. To support the research environment for visualization and fast processing, we incorporated 3D PHOVIS onto the MATLAB with graphical user interface and developed multi-core graphics processing unit modules for fast processing. The 3D PHOVIS includes following modules: (1) a mosaic volume generator, (2) a scan converter for optical scanning photoacoustic microscopy, (3) a skin profile estimator and depth encoder, (4) a multiplanar viewer with a navigation map, and (5) a volume renderer with a movie maker. This paper discusses the algorithms present in the software package and demonstrates their functions. In addition, the applicability of this software to ultrasound imaging and optical coherence tomography is also investigated. User manuals and application files for 3D PHOVIS are available for free on the website (www.boa-lab.com). Core functions of 3D PHOVIS are developed as a result of a summer class at POSTECH, “High-Performance Algorithm in CPU/GPU/DSP, and Computer Architecture.” We believe our 3D PHOVIS provides a unique tool to PA imaging researchers, expedites its growth, and attracts broad interests in a wide range of studies.

Detection of cholesterol crystals (Chcs) in atherosclerosis disease is important for understanding the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis. Polarization microscopy (PM) has been in use traditionally for detecting Chcs, but they have difficulty in distinguishing Chcs with other crystalline materials in tissue, such as collagens. Thus, most studies using PM have been limited to studying cell-level samples. Although various methods have been proposed to detect Chcs with high specificity, most of them have low signal-to-noise ratios, a high system construction cost, and are difficult to operate due to a complex protocol. To address these problems, we have developed a simple and inexpensive universal serial bus (USB) PM system equipped with a 5700 K cool-white light-emitting diode (LED). In this system, Chcs are shown in a light blue color while collagen is shown in a yellow color. More importantly, the contrast between Chcs and collagens is improved by a factor of 2.3 under an aqueous condition in these PM images. These imaging results are well-matched with the ones acquired with two-photon microscopy (TPM). The system can visualize the features of atherosclerosis that cannot be visualized by the conventional hematoxylin and eosin and oil-red-o staining methods. Thus, we believe that this simple USB PM system can be widely used to identify Chcs in atherosclerosis.

Because cholesterol crystals (Chcs) are a major cause of atherosclerosis, imaging Chcs in tissues with high sensitivity and specificity is important in diagnosing and predicting atherosclerosis. Polarizing microscopy (PM) has been widely used to image crystalline materials in tissues, but it has been difficult to distinguish Chcs from other crystalline materials in tissues. Thus, various methods such as fluorescent dye staining, Raman spectroscopy, and two-photon microscopy (TPM) have been developed to image Chcs with high sensitivity and specificity. However, these methods require expensive equipment or complex processes. Therefore, we have developed a low-cost, easy-to-use PM system using an LED light source that can distinguish Chcs from other crystalline materials with high sensitivity and specificity. Due to the nature of the LED spectrum in our system, collagen is displayed in yellow and Chcs in blue. In addition, we have improved the sensitivity and specificity by creating an aqueous condition on the sample. In the aqueous state, signals of yellowish collagen fibers were reduced and signals of Chcs were highlighted. The Chcs detection capability of our system was verified compared with the TPM image. In addition, clinical feasibility was shown by comparison with existing histological methods.

Visualization methods are very important in biomedical imaging. As a technology that understands life, biomedical imaging has the unique advantage of providing the most intuitive information in the image. This advantage of biomedical imaging can be greatly improved by choosing a special visualization method. This is more complicated in volumetric data. Volume data has the advantage of containing 3D spatial information. Unfortunately, the data itself cannot directly represent the potential value. Because images are always displayed in 2D space, visualization is the key and creates the real value of volume data. However, image processing of 3D data requires complicated algorithms for visualization and high computational burden. Therefore, specialized algorithms and computing optimization are important issues in volume data. Photoacoustic-imaging is a unique imaging modality that can visualize the optical properties of deep tissue. Because the color of the organism is mainly determined by its light absorbing component, photoacoustic data can provide color information of tissue, which is closer to real tissue color. In this research, we developed realistic tissue visualization using acoustic-resolution photoacoustic volume data. To achieve realistic visualization, we designed specialized color transfer function, which depends on the depth of the tissue from the skin. We used direct ray casting method and processed color during computing shader parameter. In the rendering results, we succeeded in obtaining similar texture results from photoacoustic data. The surface reflected rays were visualized in white, and the reflected color from the deep tissue was visualized red like skin tissue. We also implemented the CUDA algorithm in an OpenGL environment for real-time interactive imaging.

Studies have shown that a certain personality leads to higher job performance. This finding has led many companies to use personality traits when they hire employees. Despite abundant studies on personality, little is known about suitable personality traits for travel agents, especially in Taiwan. With 230 travel agents working in sales departments for corporate clients and transient travelers in Taiwan, their personalities, actual sales records, and managers’ performance evaluations were used to identify significant personality traits affecting job performance. The results reflect different personality traits for travel agents working with corporate clients and individual transient travelers. The results revealed that travel agents working with corporate contracts have strong commanding and continuative personalities but weak innovative and independent personalities. On the contrary, the agents working with transient travelers showed strong innovative, commending, independent, and sympathy personalities ...

This study investigates the effects of perceived organizational support on transactional and relational contracts and how these two types of psychological contracts influence employee intent to leave. Additionally, perceived supervisor support was examined as a predictor of perceived organizational support. Given the high employee turnover rates in the hospitality industry, lack of employee turnover studies in hospitality context, and more importantly, lack of employee turnover studies in countries other than the Western organizational contexts, the current study examines the above relationships with restaurant employees in India. Results showed that perceived supervisor support increased employee perceptions of organizational support, perceived organizational support increased relational psychological contracts but not transactional contracts, and only relational contracts had a significant effect on employees’ intent to leave. Implications of these results and issues for future research are discussed.

Atherosclerosis, the most common cause of death, kills suddenly by arterial occlusion by thrombosis, which is caused by plaque rupture. Because a growing necrotic core is highly related to plaque rupture in atherosclerosis, distinguishing between fibrous plaque and lipid-rich plaque in real time is important, but has been challenging. Real-time photoacoustic imaging requires a pulse laser with high repetition rate, which tends to sacrifice pulse energy. Furthermore, a high repetition rate is hard to achieve at lipid-sensitive wavelengths, such as 1210 nm and 1720 nm. To address the unmet need, we have developed the algorithm for PA imaging. We successfully acquired ex vivo PA images from the lipid cores of arterial plaques in rabbit arteries, using a low-power 1064-nm laser. PA images were acquired with a custom-made catheter employing a single-element 40-MHz ultrasound transducer and a compact 1064-nm laser with the pulse energy of 5 μJ and the repetition rate of 24 kHz. Acquired raw data were processed in the time and frequency domains. In the time domain, a delay-and-sum algorithm was used for image enhancement. In the frequency domain, signals exceeding the MTF were removed. As a result, SNR was increased by about 10 dB without degrading spatial resolution. We were able to achieve high-speed and high-SNR lipid target imaging in animals in spite of the low lipid sensitivity of a 1064nm laser. These results show good promise for detecting lipid-rich plaques with a compact high-speed laser, which can be easily adapted for target clinical applications.

The importance of intermediate items has been overlooked since the emergence of dominance-based Likert-type scales. The current study aims to advance our understanding of the psychometric properties of intermediate items by showing that they can be successfully calibrated by an ideal point model. A student sample and an MTurk sample were selected to answer personality scales with intermediate items included. Results showed that personality scales with intermediate items demonstrated satisfactory model fits to the ideal point model, but not to the dominance model. When analyzed with the ideal point model, intermediate items provided more information than extreme items for respondents with high latent trait levels. Among four proposed domains of intermediate items (Frequency, Average, Condition, and Transition, “FACT”), the Average domain was consistently found to exhibit the best properties. The proportion of intermediate items in the scale also affected the model fit and the validity of the scale.

In the modern workplace, employees are increasingly faced with high work demands, long work hours, and high time pressure, all of which present challenges for employees’ use and management of their...