Positive emotions are important for the physical and mental health of elderly adults. Previous research has suggested that the emotion processing mechanisms of elderly adults differ from those of young people. The current study used a mixed-methods approach to explore the emotional impacts of viewing an uplifting 360°v ideos under immersive (using a virtual reality [VR] headset) and nonimmersive (using a smartphone) conditions on elderly populations and young people. In Study 1, we conducted a pre-post treatment betweensubject field experiment (smartphone vs. VR) among 58 seniors (aged 60 years and above) in a community center in Beijing, China. One-on-one semistructured interviews of each participant were conducted after the experiment. In Study 2, we conducted a between-subject laboratory experiment with the same design among college students. The results show that while both VR and smartphone viewing conditions led to a significant positive effect on the self-reported emotions of the college students, only the smartphone viewing condition had a significant impact on the emotional well-being of the elderly participants. For college students, immersive VR had a stronger effect on inducing positive emotions than smartphone, but for elderly people, the smartphone viewing condition was more effective in improving emotional wellbeing than immersive VR. An analysis of the qualitative data from interviewing the elderly participants also revealed a divergence in the acceptance of VR technologies among elderly adults, and the sense of telepresence had both positive and negative effects on the elderly participants' emotions and experiences.

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Many sewage treatment facilities in China have been developed and operated using the Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) model. However, a big challenge faced by these PPP projects is that the subsidy requested from the government during the operation is normally higher than what was estimated originally, thus often exceeding the budget that the government can afford. This leads to a high risk of project failure or insufficient operation. This problem is largely caused by the uncertainties exhibited in the existing models, such as the Black-Scholes (BS) model. While being used in the budget estimation, these models cannot sufficiently account for the short-term uncertainty that may be incurred during the operation of projects. In this study, a method to account for this short-term uncertainty has been proposed to improve the BS model. This allows for investigations to address issues related to how the real option value of a government subsidy is affected. A Monte Carlo simulation was performed to take into account the noise in the estimation. A sensitivity analysis further revealed that this discrepancy is largely affected by the values of the relevant parameters in the short-term uncertainty model. We found that the short-term uncertainty has a significant effect on private revenue and government subsidy and that the changes of the latter are more sensitive to the change of short-term uncertainty. The value of the relevant variables of short-term uncertainty determined the fluctuation of the revenue. The mean value and revenue had a positive correlation. The reverting speed and revenue showed a negative correlation. The short-term volatility had a positive correlation toward the fluctuation range of the revenue. The simulation results indicate that this enhanced method can produce more accurate information for a better assessment of the PPP project under a wide range of uncertainty scenarios, allowing for the best decision making by the government.

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