Effect of Green Plants on Individuals' Mental Stress during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Preliminary Study.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only jeopardized people's physical health, but also put additional strain on their mental health. This study explored the role of indoor natural elements (i.e., green plants) in relieving individuals' mental stress during a prolonged stressful period. A pilot and three formal studies examined the effect of indoor green plants placed in living and working environments on people's perceived stress during the pandemic and further uncovered its underlying mechanism emphasizing a mediating role of emotion. The pilot study confirmed that the severity of the pandemic positively correlated with individuals' level of stress. Study 1 then demonstrated that indoor green plants in people's living environments might reduce their perceived stress during the pandemic, which is referred to as the "plant effect". Study 2 repeated the plant effect in a field experiment conducted in a working environment and Study 3 revealed a mediating role of positive emotion. This study provides preliminary evidence for the mitigating effect of indoor green plants on individuals' mental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The indoor green plants placed in living and working environments may elicit positive emotion, which in turn reduce people's mental stress. In addition, our results reveal that growth status of the indoor green plants affected the plant effect as well.

Irrational Consumption during the COVID-19 Period.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the world economy and has, most presumably, exerted a great deal of stress on citizens, in turn leading to the call for timely assessments of how this period might actually impact individuals at the level of everyday well-being and in their behaviors such as consumer decisions. Through one pilot study and two online survey studies, we tentatively investigated this latter question, and demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic may increase perceived stress and impair individuals' sleep quality, which in turn impels their irrational consumption. This research provides preliminary evidence for the impact of the present pandemic on irrational consumption and contributes to the literature on stress and consumer behavior.

Massive Data Management and Sharing Module for Connectome Reconstruction.

Recently, with the rapid development of electron microscopy (EM) technology and the increasing demand of neuron circuit reconstruction, the scale of reconstruction data grows significantly. This brings many challenges, one of which is how to effectively manage large-scale data so that researchers can mine valuable information. For this purpose, we developed a data management module equipped with two parts, a storage and retrieval module on the server-side and an image cache module on the client-side. On the server-side, Hadoop and HBase are introduced to resolve massive data storage and retrieval. The pyramid model is adopted to store electron microscope images, which represent multiresolution data of the image. A block storage method is proposed to store volume segmentation results. We design a spatial location-based retrieval method for fast obtaining images and segments by layers rapidly, which achieves a constant time complexity. On the client-side, a three-level image cache module is designed to reduce latency when acquiring data. Through theoretical analysis and practical tests, our tool shows excellent real-time performance when handling large-scale data. Additionally, the server-side can be used as a backend of other similar software or a public database to manage shared datasets, showing strong scalability.