Patients with serious illnesses or injuries may decide to quit their medical treatment if they think paying the fees will put their families into destitution. Without treatment, it is likely that fatal outcomes will soon follow. We call this phenomenon “near-suicide”. This study attempted to explore this phenomenon by examining how the seriousness of the patient’s illness or injury and the subjective evaluation of the patient’s and family’s financial situation after paying treatment fees affect the final decision on the treatment process. Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics were employed to analyze a dataset of 1042 Vietnamese patients. We found that the more serious the illnesses or injuries of patients were, the more likely they were to choose to quit treatment if they perceived that paying the treatment fees heavily affected their families’ financial status. Particularly, only one in four patients with the most serious health issues who thought that continuing the treatment would push themselves and their families into destitution would decide to continue the treatment. Considering the information-filtering mechanism using subjective cost–benefit judgments, these patients likely chose the financial well-being and future of their family members over their individual suffering and inevitable death. Our study also demonstrates that mindsponge-based reasoning and BMF analytics can be effective in designing and processing health data for studying extreme psychosocial phenomena. Moreover, we suggest that policymakers implement and adjust their policies (e.g., health insurance) following scientific evidence to mitigate patients’ likelihood of making “near-suicide” decisions and improve social equality in the healthcare system.

Chinese international students who studied in the United States received “double stigmatization” from American and Chinese authorities because of the “political othering” tactic during COVID-19. The research used a phenomenological approach to examine why and how specifically the transnational identity of Chinese international students in the United States shifted during the double stigmatization. The researcher conducted a total of three rounds of interviews with 15 Chinese international students who studied in the United States and returned to China between 2018 and 2020, which culminated in 45 interviews through a longitudinal study to probe the transnational identities of this population before and during the double stigmatization; the study also examined how the mindsponge mechanism worked during the identity shifts and the interplay among stigmatization, transnational identity shifts, and the mindsponge mechanism. The study concluded that before COVID-19, Chinese international students had been stigmatized in both China and the United States. And there were three identity clusters for international students’ transnational identity: homestayers, wayfarers, and navigators based on four dimensions: intercultural competence, relocation of locality, diaspora consciousness, and attachment between China and the US. The study concluded that during the double stigmatization, Chinese international students in all three identity clusters took individualism into their core values, whereas Chinese traditional values, such as nationalism, collectivism, and obedience to authority waned. In addition, the study corroborated the trust evaluator’s gatekeeper role and substantiated the validity and effectiveness of cost-benefit analysis on an individual’s decision to accept or reject new information and values.

The current manuscript sets out the initiation of a book project about “Cultural Additivity Theory” by laying out the basic distinction of “cultural additivity” with relevant concepts, such as cultural hybridity, syncretism, and creolization.

Acculturative stress can be a big problem for international students. Among the adaptation difficulties they may face, adjusting to new foods in a new environment is crucial to their well-being. Existing studies related to dietary acculturation point to gender differences, mostly on objective health impacts. Using the information processing approach, this study aims to examine the subjective perception of dietary acculturation difficulties, with a focus on the influence of social connectedness. Using the Bayesian inference approach with the Hamiltonian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique on a sample of 268 students from a Japanese international university, we found that female students are more likely to have perceived difficulties in the process of adjusting to new foods, but social connectedness lessens this effect. We also found no significant differences between domestic and international students regarding perceived difficulties of food adjustment in this study site, likely due to its highly multicultural environment. We suggest international universities provide better information about the food situations on campuses, especially for female students, and organize more cultural exchange events and food-related social activities to help students overcome barriers of food stress.

The COVID-19 crisis was remarkable because no global recession model could predict or provide early notice of when the coronavirus pandemic would happen and damage the global economy. Resilience to financial shocks is crucial for households as future crises like COVID-19 are inevitable. Therefore, the current study aims to examine the effects of financial literacy and accessibility to financial information on the financial resilience of Vietnamese households through the lens of an information-processing perspective. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was employed on a dataset of 839 samples for the investigation. We found that households of respondents with better financial knowledge and investment skills are less likely to be financially affected during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, but the effect of investment skills is weakly reliable. Accessibility to financial information through informal sources (having a household member working in the financial sector) and formal sources (participating in a financial course) is positively associated with the respondents’ financial knowledge and investment skills. This finding suggests that the spillover effect of financial knowledge and skills among residents exists, leading to better resilience toward financial shocks. However, if the financial information is inaccurate, it might lead to misinformation, false beliefs, and poor economic decisions on a large scale.

Patients with serious illnesses or injuries may decide to quit their medical treatment if they think paying the fees will put their families into destitution. Without treatment, it is likely that fatal outcomes will soon follow. We call this phenomenon “near-suicide”. Research on suicide-related psychology often faces huge difficulties in collecting and processing data due to the extreme nature of such phenomena. Employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 1042 Vietnamese patients, we found that the more serious the illnesses or injuries of patients are, the more likely they will choose to quit treatment if they perceive that paying the treatment fees heavily affect their families’ financial status. Particularly, only one in four patients with the most serious health issues who thought that continuing the treatment would push themselves and their families into destitution or bankruptcy would decide to continue the treatment. Considering the information filtering mechanism using subjective cost-benefit judgments, these patients likely choose the financial well-being and future of their family members over their individual suffering and inevitable death. Our study also demonstrates that mindsponge-based reasoning and BMF analytics can be effective in designing and processing health data for studying extreme psychosocial phenomena.

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