The amount of information received by terminal cancer patients about their illness varies across different countries. Many Chinese families object to telling the truth to the patient and doctors often follow the wish of the families. However, a population study in Hong Kong has shown that the majority wanted the information. To address this difference in attitudes, the ethical principles for and against disclosure are analysed, considering the views in Chinese philosophy, sociological studies and traditional Chinese medicine. It is argued that the Chinese views on autonomy and nonmaleficence do not justify non-disclosure of the truth. It is recommended that truth telling should depend on what the patient wants to know and is prepared to know, and not on what the family wants to disclose. The standard palliative care approach to breaking bad news should be adopted, but with modifications to address the 'family determination' and 'death as taboo' issues.

Life expectancy has been increasing rapidly in many parts of the world, including Hong Kong. A longer life can be welcome as an opportunity to fulfil as yet unmet aspirations, or to take up new challenges and projects, but it may also be a burden, especially for individuals who are unprepared. A pressing question for longer-life societies is: how may older people live their longer lives to the full positively? This article reports a qualitative study of Hong Kong Chinese people's views about ‘positive ageing’, as expressed and discussed in 15 focus groups of middle-aged and older people. Two themes emerged: first, the participants considered that positive ageing should comprise good health, having a positive life attitude, active engagement with an activity or with society, feeling supported by their families and friends, being financially secure, and living in a place with emotional ties; and secondly, several key factors that enable positive ageing were identified, namely, adopting a healthy lifestyle, thinking positively, promoting family and inter-personal relationships, and building up financial resources. The views of the participants about ‘positive ageing’ are compared with those reported from western studies, and the policy implications are considered.

These findings suggest that positive psychological resources including optimism and generalized positive affect had higher impact on cortisol secretion than their negative counterparts, and point to the need for increased attention to the potential contribution of positive mental states to well-being.

Although aging well socially (engagement with life) is as important as aging well personally (illness avoidance and functioning) (Rowe & Kahn, 1998), it has received less research attention. A caring (CE) and a productive (PE) form of engagement were derived from an analysis of Chinese cultural meanings of engagement, and combined with illness avoidance and functioning to form a 4-factor model. Confirmatory factor analysis based on 2970 Hong Kong Chinese (40 to 74 years) showed a good model fit that was replicated a year later with 2120 of the original sample. Further analysis led to a more parsimonious model where illness avoidance and functioning converged into a single second-order factor whereas CE and PE remained as distinct first-order factors. The results supported the differentiation of Rowe and Kahn's engagement with life component into caring and productive engagements.

We propose a model of volunteering and test its validity across four cultural groups. We hypothesize that individuals’ explicit prosocial motivation relates positively to sustained volunteering, which is conceptualized as a latent factor comprising activity as a volunteer, service length, service frequency, and hours of volunteering. Moreover, we introduced implicit prosocial motivation and hypothesized that the relationship between explicit prosocial motivation and sustained volunteering would be amplified by implicit prosocial motivation. Data were collected from samples in China, Germany, Turkey, and the United States. Results confirmed our expectation that, across cultures, sustained volunteering was associated with explicit prosocial motivation and that the relationship between explicit prosocial motivation and sustained volunteering was strongest when implicit prosocial motivation was also high. By including implicit prosocial motivation, our study offers a novel approach to identifying sustained volunteer involvement, which can be of particular relevance for recruitment activities of voluntary organizations across various cultural contexts.