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Severe psychological distress is prevalent in the Chinese adolescent population. Family dysfunction, higher academic pressure, poor relationship with others and negative self-perception are important risk factors associated with psychological distress in adolescents. More studies using the K10 scale are needed so that national and international comparisons can be made.

Thresholds for detecting the angle of rotation of vertical symmetrical patterns containing few or no explicit vertical or horizontal contours were found to be almost as low as those for an actual vertical line extending approximately the same range. This hyperacuity performance, which we refer to as implicit orientation discrimination, shares most of its properties with the orientation discrimination of explicit lines, suggesting a category of orientation processing whose neural mechanisms are related to those involved in the processing of straight contours and those underlying the detection of axes of symmetry. Strong binding effects between the components of the figures were demonstrated and their temporal interactions were also investigated. Our results have implications for possible neural interactions early in the cortical visual stream.

Three essential experimental parameters in the ultrasonic emulsification process, namely sonication time, acoustic amplitude and processing volume, were individually investigated, theoretically and experimentally, and correlated to the emulsion droplet sizes produced. The results showed that with a decrease in droplet size, two kinetic regions can be separately correlated prior to reaching a steady state droplet size: a fast size reduction region and a steady state transition region. In the fast size reduction region, the power input and sonication time could be correlated to the volume-mean diameter by a power-law relationship, with separate power-law indices of -1.4 and -1.1, respectively. A proportional relationship was found between droplet size and processing volume. The effectiveness and energy efficiency of droplet size reduction was compared between ultrasound and high-pressure homogenisation (HPH) based on both the effective power delivered to the emulsion and the total electric power consumed. Sonication could produce emulsions across a broad range of sizes, while high-pressure homogenisation was able to produce emulsions at the smaller end of the range. For ultrasonication, the energy efficiency was higher at increased power inputs due to more effective droplet breakage at high ultrasound intensities. For HPH the consumed energy efficiency was improved by operating at higher pressures for fewer passes. At the laboratory scale, the ultrasound system required less electrical power than HPH to produce an emulsion of comparable droplet size. The energy efficiency of HPH is greatly improved at large scale, which may also be true for larger scale ultrasonic reactors.

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